Having worked on quantum computing in some of the leading labs for nearly a decade I do share some of the author's pessimism. My feeling is that theory once again is way ahead of experiment here. Also many theoretician who work in the field of quantum information are all too happily ignoring all the details that actually make it so darn hard to maintain quantum coherence and scale. Having said that I still think/hope that some day we will manage to harness nature at the level of individual quanta with the level of precision required to perform some non-trivial quantum computation. We're not there yet and I think some major technological breakthroughs need to happen before that. I am afraid there's too much hype around QC and when it fades it will bring down the field with it.