Last time I checked they haven't even beaten semi-recent laptops in direct comparisons of execution time, even for very synthetic problems.
Probably true, but in some ways it's not a fair comparison - since the field is only 20-30 years old, it's not surprising the offerings are comparable to something in the earlier ages of computing. Many kinds of mechanisms that seemed esoteric at their origin (e.g. the primitive but groundbreaking neural networking of the Perceptron) have become everyday reality for us decades later.