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A search space that's 2^2000 big when each fitness function evaluation takes a few seconds is intractable on a conventional computer. The relative performance gain is exponential the more qubits you add, which is why this is the first interesting quantum computer (or quantum optimizer if you're being picky).

I'm not sure where you're getting your information: everyone in this thread seems to be parroting the same popsci headline that it's not a "real" quantum computer, but that completely misses the point. Regardless of whether or not it's a general purpose computing machine with programmable logic, it can still perform mathematical optimization of an objective function over a superposition of bits. Saying that it's not quantum because it's not general purpose is a complete distortion of the facts.

Unfortunately the NSA doesn't do a lot of evolutionary structural optimization :/

It basically performs the same function as traditional combinatoric optimization algorithms, e.g. simulated annealing and evolutionary optimization, but it does a much much much better job at it since it can test the superposition of the entire search space instead of picking at points here and there.

Now this is starting to get interesting. 2000 qubits is where it starts being applicable to meaningful real-world combinatoric optimization problems. I would kill to have access to one of these machines for my research...

Edit: What's the beef?