Technology

I made the attempt, but couldn't parse that first link.

Fair - it is indeed difficult for non-experts. But all you need to see from it is that it is a concrete example of a (small) actual quantum computer as reported on outside a corporate press release. The focus on error correction comes from the fact that this is the next big hurdle in the way of scaling up. But the machine is there!

This is just one more kind of chip that will be found in computers of the future.

Exactly - this was never meant to replace classical computers, but to do things that are impossible for classical computers to ever do.

Problem is, this only works for systems that have a known answer (like cryptography) with a verifiable result, otherwise the system never knows when the equation is "complete".

This isn't quite right. It's true, there's never 100% certainty you have the right answer, but 99.99999% is usually good enough. A classical computer also isn't 100% certain since it's also technically just a "physics experiment", but it has an extremely low error rate, like 10^(-20).

when they talk about speed, they aren't exactly being forthright

Sure, quantum computers aren't faster than a classical computer for now, and won't be for a while. But exponential speedup means that the problems we can eventually solve with a quantum computer are literally impossible for a physical computer to ever solve. This part of the corporate hype speak is true. It's a purely physical fact. Though for sure we aren't there yet!

it's... not really useful in power expenditure or financially to do much beyond a large corporation or government breaking encryption.

Indeed, very likely nobody is ever going to be doing personal computing on these, but they were never meant for that, they are meant for supercomputing level calculations.