"Japan making steel 20-30% lighter and 25% stronger than the toughest high-tensile steel at the same price":
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/japan-making-steel-20-3...
http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/japan-making-steel-20-3...
That said, neither is quite like this flash bainite. Both are very hard steels, so manufacturing and fabrication techniques need to suit the steels at hand. For example, machining the steels I listed can be very difficult and murders tooling bits compared to machining mild steel. Welding can also be difficult and usually involves significant preheating and post-weld heat treatment processes. Flash bainite apparently has some benefits in those areas but to what extent is hard to quantify.
I'd love to know more about this flash bainite process, but their website is really scant on details. Other sources of info suggest that you weld the structure together then flash process it afterwards, which I'd assume is completely useless for anything with complex geometry or substantial size. A military report [3] of its performance shows that welding after FB treating literally halves its strength, as you'd expect since the heat of welding is basically like traditionally heat-treating it over longer durations. In that sense the ones I mentioned are better because you can more slowly heat treat them post-welding via more flexible methods that can deal with more complex shapes. This lets you get restored strength properties because those steels aren't reliant on a flash-style process.
Where I think this reigns is in its ability to be formed easily whilst still being strong. Forming those steels I mentioned is a nightmare. In that sense it would certainly have applications where you can fabricate via fastening (rivets, bolts, etc.) but it seems to fall short when you need to weld it into anything more than a small butt-weld of two sheets.
Certainly an interesting development and I'd love to see it realised to a commercial product as it'd definitely have some uses, but it's not the be-all-end-all holy grail of steel.
[1]: http://www.bisalloy.com.au/
The big win for me is the parts can be air quenched - the slower cooling eliminates one of the biggest rejection flaws, straightness
For example, when I deal with the castings I procure, we mandate that the supplier either repairs them prior to the heat treatment stage or they must be fully heat treated again after weld repairs. This helps resolve the otherwise brittle HAZ. You can do this, because castings are usually quench-and-tempered, which is a relatively slow process.
Welding stuff like Bis, Weldox, etc. requires both pre- and post- heat treating in order to let the weld form and also address the HAZ properly afterwards to restore its strength. You can do this because the processes to heat treat it are traditional and relatively slow. This lets you get (somewhat reduced compared to the parent metal) structurally sound levels of strength out of the weld locality. Because of it, Weldox and Bis both see widespread use in truck bodies, crane arm trusses, etc.
This is in constrast to flash bainite, which relies on it being a very fast process. By virtue of it being a fast, tailor-made process you can't just do it to a complex geometry. By welding it, you dump heat into the weld which then air-cools slowly as the weld cools, completely running counter to the flash bainite process that is necessary to produce the strength. That's why you see a halving in UTS in the mil report I linked in source 3 of my first post - you simply can't recover from the slower heat-and-cool process without doing the whole treatment again, and you can only do that on easy geometries (it seems).
As said, if I understand what you're saying we're essentially saying the same thing, but I think I phrased it quite badly in my post. Not that you disagree with me, but it just made me realise that I don't think I worded it well and wanted to clarify.
For reference, bainite has completely replaced 8630 in all ranges of quenching and tempering as a material for us, and I'm currently in the process of phasing out most of our Hardox parts in lieu of bainite as well. Haven't used Bisalloy plate for years due to its even-worse-than-expected machinability.
Basically it is a fantastic material and I want to marry it.