There is a quite interesting post in Shtetl-Optimized about this topic. Here you can get an idea of many researcher's opinion about after the announcement of the discovery (it does not seem to have changed much since then); if you are looking for the opinion of the community, this is definitely want you should read.
Link: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=284
What I get from the discussion: people seem to agree that these Turing Machine are universal (in some sense), and maybe the simplest Turing machine we can hope to find (again, in some sense); yet nobody has found that universality of this simple machine is: meaningful, insightful or profitable in science.
Anyway, it's cool :)