This seems like a great accomplishment; a design so good that others are inspired to implement it.
Not to diminish his contributions but the high level idea was relatively simple. Break a file into pieces and then reconstitute them using hashes. The devil really is in being able to actually implement that which he also did. Ashwin Navin was pivotal in getting it out there for people to use as well.
Splitting a file into parts predates BitTorrent by quite a while. Rare archives, with a parity chunk were being uploaded to alt.bin newsgroups for years if not decades before BitTorrent was ever released. It was the swarm upload feature which did it, allowed modem users, with poor upload speeds, to participate in uploading the file to everyone on the swarm that did it.