I think this will unlock a lot of University robotics/computer vision projects. The existing options for doing embedded computer vision were pretty terrible.
I;m not sure but I'd expect autofocus doesn't work well with computer vision. Most of the lenses and sensors I've worked with in raspi land have various image aberations (spherical, color). They are very different from the computer vision cameras I have.
I believe most modern smartphones have more powerful cameras than ArduCam. They're more expensive, but broken / older smartphones can be had for cheap.
I highly doubt any smartphone cam worth a damn and actually interface properly with the CSI bus lanes on a RasPi.
I believe the grandparent is suggesting using a smartphone in place of using a raspberry pi, not trying to extract the camera and connect it to the pi.
There's been about 5 years now, where the common refrain is to just use a smartphone camera. And in some cases people are literally writing an app and strapping a cellphone to a drone, but it's not ideal. This arducam camera is the closest thing to an embedded cellphone camera that is actually usable in robotics.