> Dr Otte reports read speeds of 1-2 minutes per block. He reckons he could boost those speeds drastically, to about a megabit per second. That would be a big improvement, but still thousands of times slower than modern hard drives.

Try tens of times slower. There would absolutely be applications for nonvolatile memory that reads at 1 Mbps but has this kind of insane memory density. For most applications you'd probably have to make the technology stable at room temperature though.