What I find interesting about this is the potential for biologists to sort of dogfood their own computing platforms for biology related problems...e.g. protein folding. Not saying it's going to happen, but there's possibly an interesting symmetry between computation and experimental apparatus.
That's precisely right. I think between this and some of the upcoming work in memcomputing (& self-organzing electronics more broadly), we have a new set of tools which may resemble 'physical oracles' . IE, these special systems can compute exponentially difficult problems through thermodynamics or whatever other quantum-ally optimal properties biology has evolved to use. They may not be universal computers at first, but they ultimately may point the way forward towards that vision.