Looks to me like the big plus with this is cheap catalysts on the electrolysis side of things. IIRC the energy available from the resulting hydrogen has historically been about half of the energy cost to separate it from water. Still leaves me the question about why we dont just capture the electricity from the solar panel into a battery and skip a couple of levels of efficiency loss.
Yes, I agree, a solar cell battery system is currently a more efficient way to do this. Improving the oxygen reaction efficiency makes it a closer competition and although I can't give you the actual numbers I'm pretty sure that the conventional solar cell/battery will still have an advantage.
I think that perhaps the more important point is that there are many other industrial applications many of which the public doesn't know about where this could improve efficiency and save millions of $ in energy costs long before the so-called "hydrogen economy" comes into existence, if indeed it ever comes into existence.
But a story suggesting that maybe, just maybe, in the future, we will use this to run our cars or heat our homes and perhaps give some relief on energy costs and reduce oil imports sells a lot better than one saying some chemical company is going to save $/year in energy costs starting a year or two from now because they now have a better catalyst.
MB