[mikewave]

There are real, usable, near-realtime Quantum Annealers, which are different from gate model quantum computers, but have proven to be much more amenable to physical implementation. These are more geared towards optimization functions, which can have practical use for logistics, physics simulations, and more.

Gate model computers interest everyone because of the potential to factor large numbers; this could potentially render a lot of existing and past cryptography open to decryption that otherwise will be locked up for aeons, especially considering the apparently decaying effect of Moore's Law of late. However, it probably takes millions or billions of gate qubits to do that, whereas thousands of annealing qubits are enough to solve some interesting problems, and to contribute to finding better solutions when combined with classical compute in a hybrid setup.