There's nothing wrong with doing pure research as a startup, in fact I'd love to see more of these kind of startups and I'm thinking about starting one myself!

There's nothing wrong with doing pure research as a startup, in fact I'd love to see more of these kind of startups and I'm thinking about starting one myself! What's harmful (IMHO) is making spectacular claims (look we have a working quantum computer!) and then not back them up by evidence. It is of course okay to sell your product aggressively as a startup, and sometimes to oversell it as well (fake it until you can make it), but I really have my doubts that D-Wave can "make it" in the near future, as there are just so many difficult problems to solve for which we don't even have a viabe approach yet (e.g building large scale qubit coupling schemes), and trust me most quantum computing research groups have people that are at least as smart and dedicated as the people working at D-Wave.