My biggest problem with these results is that they are comparing the D-Wave machine against classical simulations that are built to solve the same problems the D-Wave is best at solving. The gold standard in the quantum algorithms world is to show that you can solve a given problem faster than any possible classical approach in the O(n) sense. This has been done for many problems, notably search, which can be done in sqrt(n) vs n/2. Factoring is faster but has not been proven to be faster than all possible classical approaches.

Another way to put this is that what this post is saying is that problem x can be solved y times faster on the D-Wave machine when compared to classical systems designed to act like the D-Wave machine. There are many other classical approaches that could be use to solve x. If the problem was significant enough a best know classical algorithm could be devised and implemented on an asic. Could the D-Wave machine beat this approach?

Or for less significant problems, could the cost of the D-Wave machine compare to paying someone to devise an special purpose algorithm per problem and implement it in C, Java, C#, Haskell / other fast languages. How much does it cost to pay someone to do this one something like top coder?