I don't think I understand your point. By awesome I meant it's a very exciting/interesting field of research. I don't mean to call thermodynamics awesome because it powers cars or because it's a well research field.
Trying to understand how the brain works or making a computer that works in a similar way is awesome to me. If there are still computational limitations that makes it not practical, that's still an awesomely interesting subject.
It was the IBM SyNAPSE Chip [1]. It's actually been known since 1988/89 that neural networks can approximate any continuous function [2], but this chapter explains how in a much more intuitive sense.
Any more news about those chips that were optimized for neural networks ? Was it IBM or Samsung ?