It's a fascinating approach. The analogy to physics is especially fascinating. I have only kept up with the literature, not seriously implemented it, so I could be wrong. But what I understand is that while simulated annealing is good for many things, it hasn't shown itself to be best for anything and the improvements on it have tended to changes that weakened the analogy with physics [1]. I find this disappointing since in its raw form, simulated annealing suggested a sort of "physics of information processing" mapping hard computation problems to states of matter. But it seems like analogies may be as misleading as they are productive sometimes.
[1] for example traveling salesman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem, the first problem I saw simulated annealing applied to [in a reprint someone tossed out in Evans Hall at UCB circa 1981].