[eru]

That CA in general were Turing complete is 'obvious'. What was novel is that Wolfram's employee proved something like Turing completeness for a 1d CA with two states and only three cells total in the neighbourhood.

I say something-like-Turing completeness, because it requires a very specially prepared tape to work that makes it a bit borderline. (But please look it up properly, this is all from memory.)

Having said all that, the result is a nice optimisation / upper bound on how little you need in terms of CA to get Turing completeness, but I agree that philosophically nothing much changes compared to having to use a slightly more complicated CA to get to Turing completeness.