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I get the impression that all these quantum computing "results" are actually just quantum experiments dictated by the hardware and they don't have enough degrees of freedom in the system to control it enough to be called a computer.

And of course simulating a complex quantum system classically is intractable, so the comparison to classical computers is deceptive.

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This is 100% it.

D-Wave is great at solving issues that directly map to what it is physically solving i.e approximating the state of lowest energy of some entangled (sparse) lattice with fixed topology.

The point is, what if certain problems can be mapped to it such that business value could come out of it?

So far this hasn't been a thing, but at least it can do something non-trivial. There's no other quantum computing device that is as close to attaining real-world usefulness than D-Wave.

It is exactly because simulating quantum phenomena on a classical computer is so difficult that the comparison makes sense.

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