I believe the primary most practical use would be compression. Devices could have quantum decoder chips that give us massive compression gains which could also massively expand storage capacity. Even modest chips far before the realization of the scale necessary for cryptography breaking could give compression gains on the order of 100 to 1000x. IMO that's the real game changer. The theoretical modeling and cryptography breaking that you see papers being published on is much further out. The real work that isn't being publicized because of the importance of trade secrets is on storage / compression.
Someone just has to figure out how to actually implement middle out compression on a quantum computer.
> compression gains on the order of 100 to 1000x.
This feels like woo-woo to me.
Suppose you're compressing the text of a book: How would a quantum processor let you get a much better compression ratio, even in theory?
If you're mistakenly describing the density of information on some kind of physical object, that's not data compression, that's just a different storage medium.
Pretty sure quantum algorithms can't be used for compression.