Actually you should be taking the claims very seriously. This has been an area Micron has been researching for decades. They've had a patent on the memory cell for about 11 years now (US6777705). Phase change memory has for a very long time been one of those just over the horizon technologies, but Micron has perfected it well enough to compete with NAND and partnered with Intel to bring it to market.
This isn't something that appeared out of nowhere. Take a look at this presentation:
https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/presentati...
Page 20 starts the section on "3-D Cross-Point Memory". They even have a 64Mb demonstrator on page 23, fabbed sometime before the 2011 Flash Memory Summit.
Additional info on 64Mb demonstrator:
http://investors.micron.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=4672...
Additionally, in early 2014, they stopped selling PCM modules, stating that "Micron's previous two generations of PCM process technologies are not available for new designs or technology evaluation, as the company is focused on developing a follow-on process to achieve lower cost per bit, lower power and higher performance."
Job description details mentioning PCM, chalcogenides, and "cross point technology":
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/12292797?trk=job_view_si...
And as far as process, as early as 2013 (2013 fall analyst conference handouts), Micron had PCM on a 45nm process and was listing 2xnm as next node. If they've gotten together with Intel and announced this, they have already reached 2xnm and/or beyond or are certain in their capability to do so.
Because of the way flash memory is organized into pages and blocks, latency is very workload specific. Can you point out where anyone claimed it was better than DRAM latency?, the BBC article says "DRAM chips are still faster than 3D Xpoint, but the difference is much smaller than when compared with flash".
And power consumption. This is PCM. Power consumption by the array when not being read/written is zero.