If speed was held back by gate time, then sure, but i'd have thought that propagation delays between gates will be kind of relevant.
Making the clock 1,000,000 times faster would mean the silicon would be 1,000,000 times shorter (in each dimension) so I guess such designs would support some super high clock rates for some specialist applications for small gate arrays, but for general purpose computing, hmm, i'm not so sure.
Propagation delay isn't purely about distance: it's about the time needed for the output to settle in reaction to inputs. That includes capacitive delays: containers of electrons having to fill up.
Say we are talking about some gate with a 250 picosecond propagation delay.
But light can travel 7.5 cm in that time; way, way larger than the chip on which that gate is found, let alone that gate itself. That tells you that the bottleneck in the gate isn't caused by the input-to-output distance, which is tiny.
Ya the article focuses on computing but I think it could enable totally new electronic devices like frequency/phase controllable leds, light field displays and cameras, ultra fast ir based wifi etc...
Making the clock 1,000,000 times faster would mean the silicon would be 1,000,000 times shorter (in each dimension) so I guess such designs would support some super high clock rates for some specialist applications for small gate arrays, but for general purpose computing, hmm, i'm not so sure.