That would be fun to watch, but to be overly pedantic about it, it will take a computer with hundreds of qubits to break current public key encryption.

It will take hundreds of fault tolerant qubits. That means it will take potentially millions of physical qubits of relatively high quality. There is a long road ahead from 72 relatively medium quality to millions of relatively high quality qubits.

As a layman, I've never heard of qubit quality. What is it exactly? How do you determine it? And why does it affect computation?

Qubit quality is defined by the quantum volume [0]. Errors that occur when gates are applied to qubits need to be below a certain threshold to perform error correction.

[0]: https://www.research.ibm.com/ibm-q/resources/quantum-volume....

Is quantum error correction really that demanding? I thought it was only a small multiple of the number of qubits, not orders of magnitude more.

How many hundreds? We are apparently at 72 qubits...sounds to me we are a year or two away from what you're saying

As your sibling comment pointed out, we still have a long way to go before we are able to make large amounts of stable and thus truly usable qubits.