The specific improvement scrypt makes over bcrypt is not yet relevant; nobody has ever hardware-optimized a bcrypt cracker, and the project that successfully does so and publishes their results will have made a contribution to cryptography literature.
Sure they have. A hardware-optimized bcrypt cracker is called a GPU. I can buy a 480-core GPU on Newegg for $350, but it doesn't come with any more RAM than a low-end PC does.