Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was already 'solved'. This is a huge setback, in my opinion.
A setback, yes. Huge for those who wasted their time? Maybe.
But compare it to, say, Lysenkoism. That was a huge setback for Soviet biology.
As someone pointed out above, in fields where you collection and analysis times are measured in years if not decades you could run into trouble, but for chemistry and biology where you are at significantly shorter collection timescales, it isn't that big of an issie
Wait, is this a separate scandal? What's with all this bogus crystallography?
As such, they're way easier to falsify than papers in even really closely related fields. I've spent plenty of time pulling structures from ICSD and other databases populated off Acta Cryst; my PhD was in computational mineralogy - but a raw simulation isn't a publishable result in the way data hot off the diffractometer can be.
By the way, if anyone here gets the chance to visit a neutron source (eg Isis, isis.rl.ac.uk), take it! Amaaaazing machines.
The results were certainly different but perhaps the lab is the same. I'll check when I'm not on my iPhone.
However, your conclusion doesn't follow for fields where experimental results are few and far between. Fraud would be much harder to detect in a field like astrophysics or econometrics. There simply isn't enough data, so rather than contradicting the fraudulent results, you will probably just average truth with lies.
If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why.
Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish").
This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend to work on good faith and then backtrack when things get screwy.