Scott Aaronson is not a physicist nor an engineer so therefore is not the best commentator on hardware development. He clashes with others at MIT, like Dr. T. Olando, who have designed qubits. Moreover, the link posted in two years out of date.

Re: “The physicists who developed the idea of an adiabatic quantum computer say that D-Wave seems to have misinterpreted their theory to make unrealistic claims and the whole thing is regarded as a bit of a joke in the physics community.” Not exactly an accurate summary. Likely, you are reading what Aaronson posted. In 2007, Dr. U. Vazirani (Aaronson’s supervisor) wrote The Economist “Their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van Dam, Mosca and I wrote on “The power of adiabatic quantum computing”.” However, no paper by that title appears to exist, so very likely nobody misunderstood or even understood that particular paper. He hasn’t corrected the title for the public record. The Economist never published the letter. Like, Dr. Aaronson, Dr. Vazirani is hardly an expert in superconducting quantum hardware.

“I dont understand why d-wave causes so much stir in the qubit community.” It appears to be a two way cultural war.

The first axis is between theoretical computer science types and hardware types. The CS types don’t need a real quantum computer for their field to exist. Indeed, the existence of a real computer will cause them to (re)address the physical axioms on which their esoteric quantum computing schemes are based. Don’t forget focus on adiabatic quantum compute is the nail in the coffin for circuit model quantum computer – a paradigm many theorists practiced in for years. The hardware types are more cautious but favour the idea of a real quantum computer. There are some hardware people that hold out of the circuit model. There are some theorists that really want a working computer of any type.

The second axis is the public versus private debate. Some hate the idea of a private company being a leader in superconducting quantum computing. Some go so far as to see the existence of company in the field as an end to their public funding for research in to a futuristic computing device. Others are fine with a company being involved and point out no university has a program to develop a scalable quantum computer and actually has a working device and plan to improve it. Of course some fall in the middle.