It seemed to me that the victory came down to two critical advantages: First, the buzzer. When all contestants had the answer at the earliest possible moment (and you could tell both humans did, many times), Watson won the points purely based on speed. Meh. Second, the questions. I estimated that about 2/3rds of the questions could be answered by a Google search in roughly equal time. The most difficult part, something touched on by the concurrent RPI lectures / commentary, was sorting out the right word from the resulting search context. This was particularly obvious on the 'fill-in-the-blank' style questions, and the Beatles category in the first round of Part 1 favored Watson with a straight-out search so much it was painful to watch. I know the point of the project was to demonstrate lingual awareness, but I suspect a more evenly-distributed set of questions (when do you design an algorithm for the best case, anyways?) and a distributed response time would make Watson's efforts considerably more meaningful. I greatly enjoyed the comment on Ken's part 2 Final Jeopardy question, though.

While high-level abstractions like .NET and Java are splendid modern tools, nothing teaches you the fundamentals of how a computer thinks and works like a line-by-line BASIC program. Two reasons off-hand: a) The leap to assembly language is natural and easily understood. b) The leap in the reverse direction, to functional languages, is mostly a simple matter of wrapping blocks in headers and return statements. If you start in a language with these two attributes, you're already 1 - 2 years into a collegiate computer science degree.

This platform is a thing of beauty--a lot easier to list what it CAN'T be used for that what it can. If it was my toy, I'd start with orbital assembly. Yes, they're probably going to utilize it as an incredibly dynamic observation vehicle and stuff it full of sensors, but the fact that it's now a proven technology (and was up for seven months, with multiple controlled orbit changes!) is a big milestone. We don't see very many leaps forward in space technology now adays, but this is one of them.