There's something else going on here. The one-line explanation is that true QC requires quantum entanglement to be preserved, for reasonably long time scales,

There's something else going on here. The one-line explanation is that true QC requires quantum entanglement to be preserved, for reasonably long time scales, across all qubits. It's not believed that the D-Wave 128-bit machine does this, although the 8-bit one seems to. Here's the opinion of an independent critic: http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-prof-scott-aaronson-on-d-waves-quantum-computer/ http://blogs.forbes.com/alexknapp/2011/05/24/q-and-a-with-pr...