It is an amazingly powerful technique. We've been working on a service which lets you do this kind of learning with any JSON stream. You can see a demo here:
The amazing part of what DeepMind has achieved is its capability to learn from raw pixel input with deep convolutional neural networks, which as I understand it quite different from what you do.
Still the reinforcement learning part is the same, but reinforcement learning was not the main contribution of this nature paper.
Its not all that different, we take multiple asynchronous streams of messages integrate them into a coherent predictive model, and use that to feed the reinforcement learning. The messages can contain images, a simple case can be seen in the demo with a 1d vision sensor.
Still the reinforcement learning part is the same, but reinforcement learning was not the main contribution of this nature paper.