I think it's significant because it's a huge increase over '0'.

I think so, yes. No battery means smaller, cheaper devices that can all interconnect which opens up all sorts of possibilities for making everyday objects 'smart'. Your router could tell you where your keys are. Your fridge could tell you when you are out of milk.

On a distributed level, there's a lot of other cool stuff that could be done as well.

1kb/s is an absolute surplus in a lot of machine-to-machine applications. With a lot of embedded sensors and such that run over cellular networks, carriage is billed by the kilobyte, to illustrate that point.

1kb/s is fine, that's enough to tweet. 2.5 feet is not very far but I suspect that's easy to improve, and it would not need much improvement to become really useful - eg if you improve it by a factor of 3 it's good enough to function in a typical corridor, and so on.

1kb/s isn't much compared to what we're used to, but I can see it being sufficient for some communications.