(Also equivalently and more commonly known as the Ising Model). The D-wave chip is just a very fast hardware-based Ising model solver. You can use it to both find the minimum of a problem through cooling, or by controlling the temperature of the system you can also do sampling. And since so many important problems can be reduced to an Ising model, this is interesting.

What I don't fully understand is why is it so important to show that the device takes advantage of Quantum effects functionally? A classical super-efficient Ising Model solver is interesting enough.

Also, the video in the article is really quite terrible. I only half understood it because I know what they were trying to say, but if I didn't I think I'd be very confused at best, and amusingly misinformed at worst.