> If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?

Riddle me this then: what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?

Sure, a good deal of engineering went into this, but the hard part - solving bipedal locomotion - had been done long before that. Apart from showing off it's not really advancing the field and so there's not too much left to be impressed by (honestly, the battery and actuator efficiency that allowed the thing to do a half marathon was MUCH more impressive, at least to me). It seems to me to be more analogous to car tuning.