People are always looking for the next big thing, just think back 10 years ago and the Poet GA's and how it was touted

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GaAs has been a holy grail of semiconductor design for about 40 years. (My father worked for RCA, Motorola, and TI between 1958 and 1974 and consulted with others in the decades after those years [wafer fabrication] and he has made this clear to me.) The fact that POET was on the scene with an apparently successful approach to solving it less than 10 years ago is very near-term in geological time with regard to the expectations for GaAs. 

The only reason it has been so long for POET to finalize this tech has to do with (IMO) their humble small-facility R&D origins and the amount of money they have had at their disposal. Others may enter the game late, but they won't have POET's patent portfolio, no matter how much money they have backing them thanks to having ridden along on other technology waves in large and well-known companies.