Your explanation about why you think it's special us useful a good example of a positive outcome of the original comment. The way you initially denigrate the question is not.
As pg put it:
Maybe you think you're making some sort of important point here. Or maybe you realize your comment is inane and you think it's witty. But (perhaps without realizing it) you and the people upvoting you represent one of the worst forces at work in the world. The people who ridicule new things when they first appear in incomplete form are one of the worst drags on innovation. [1]
Looks to me like at least one personal already countered that claim, thus it is no longer undeniably dismissive. I would say your response to his question is even more dismissive of any "dismissal" that may had been interpreted from the OP.
As a real life example, I was leaning towards the original poster's interpretation of the product. The reply it spurred helped me see the product in a different light, and I think it has more merit than I originally did, even if I'm not sure the technologies in use, or even how they are combined, is especially new and noteworthy. As is all to often the case, it's the implementation that matters.
In think my initial opinion was dismissive, the original comment was inquisitive (if a bit critical, but I see nothing wrong with some light criticism), the reply it spurred was illuminating, and my resulting opinion was hopeful. I view that as part of HN's success, not something that needs to be overly policed.
To put it another way: real-time subtitles. Imagine having something like this in Google Glass. As a person with profound hearing loss, that blows me away.
This technology could easily be repurposed for subtitling videos.