In the live webcast they said that they use auto-complete to populate the instant results. Typing "online deg" auto-completes to "online degrees", so that's the query used to generate the instant results.
Ask it another way: do you think a service that shows what the current google autocompletions are for every prefix of a given term becomes more or less interesting to SEOs after this announcement?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I clicked on it because it was so much funnier than the rest of them.
Turns out: affiliate link.
Or some sort of americanized japanese dating porn or something ... couldn't really tell.
Still. I definitely agree that it completely changes the SEO game.
Google auto-completes brands and keywords that only have 2 or 3 website references (I know of a site in stealth and I just tried it, and it worked. Google has indexed their homepage and title, and as I typed it in it auto-completed their name, with only a single website to reference).
If you have that much power, you probably have a better way to spend it. Also I would bet that suggest keywords come from user searches themeselves, not the web. That's why I suspect the impact of this is probably relatively minimal.
Call me crazy, but I think Google just might have considered the SEO impact before deploying this. If it's not literally on a checklist somewhere for deployment of search features, I'd be stunned.