To be precise:
I have no problem with the use of Quantum Annealing. I once had good familiarity with the issues of protein folding (I was a molecular biologist who went back to school to study medicine) and it seems eminently suited to that problem --and undoubtedly several others-- but one shouldn't expect it to apply directly to general computation. OTOH, QA is quite analogous to some forms of analog computing, which I admire and feel is given far too little attention today, and which proved itself capable of surprising things.
But here's a press release you'll never read: "Company X (XCO) announced today that it will no longer be seeking or accepting investment funding. It CEO, Dr. Frank Earnest, said 'We made some really big advances early on; some have called them Nobel-caliber quantum leaps; but over the last few years we've seen that we can only make substantial steady improvements in our technology, not the quantum leap(s) required to allow it to live up to its promise. We are continuing our development work solely in the hope of patenting some key technique or process that the next groundbreaking start-up will want or need to license."
Rarely does a company give up on funding (or investors give up on the jackpot), even if all the top management agrees they are NOT on the road to a breakthrough -- and that's not evil: almost all founder/academicians necessarily accept that incremental research in a field is worthwhile, even if a breakthrough is not imminent. However, their press releases continue to make them sound like the Next Great Thing -- and that is the snake oil. Marketing runs on snake oil, is lubricated by snake oil, and outputs snake oil.