I can't tell, from the blog post or comments here, how the web component is an improvement on just using <blockquote> and <cite>. The styling does look nice, but is that the only real difference?
Nope, beats me. As far as I can tell it's just text with a hyperlink. Clicking the link doesn't even take you to the location on the page the quote is from.
It's a much more interesting development in the same direction! The implementation currently only seems to work when transcluding content on the same domain, rather than quoting anything from across the web. Having discovered this, I feel I have a bit more context for where the creator is coming from!