IBM isn't in the research business. It's a for profit company that wants to sell you these machines for an incredible amount of money.

But it's all a scam since these machines can do nothing useful, except allowing you to try out programming simple quantum algorithms.

BTW they keep obfuscating the difference between logical and physical qubits. Logical qubits is what it's all about but this article sort of uses them interchangeably. Most of the time they're talking about physical qubits, though.

Someone once calculated that you'd need a million physical qubits to crack RSA-4096. That shows you how much farther we have to go for these machines to be useful.