No, not really. The way proof-of-work is used is nothing like in HashCash (more generally known as a time lock puzzle), the solution to a decentralized clock is the one piece that is new. In the paper it is referred to as "Timestamp Server". Everything else is previously known tech, but the clock piece is an invention, the invention that made it all possible.
I'm not trying to diminish the discovery, it's quite the contrary, I think its simplicity and elegance is what makes it so impressive. It's a very elegant solution to a very complex problem and you could explain it in a few minute to somebody with the right technical background.
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That class of actor can even potentially avoid the financial sunk costs that would ordinarily be required, although that in turn would require the use of several zero-day exploits and/or the use of similarly high-value resources usually available only to state-level actors.
Still, under certain circumstances I could see something along these lines being the opening move in World War IV (not to be overly dramatic or anything). Or perhaps a much smaller conflict, should any state be foolish enough to standardize on a national cryptocurrency of their own creation for internal use.
I agree with you, I always thought that the Bitcoin algorithm was very clever and "mind opening" in a way. It's one of these things I'd never have thought about but almost seems obvious in hindsight. What's even more interesting is that basically all of it is pre-existing technology: HashCash, ECC, Merkle trees etc... Just combined together in a clever way to create something that's more than the sum of their parts.
Now where I become a naysayer is when we switch from the realm of intellectual curiosity and into the world of cryptocurrencies today. Being clever and innovative doesn't necessarily mean useful or valuable. We have plenty of clever ideas out there that don't have much of a practical use (or used to have one but are now obsolete). Duff's Device, sleep sort, the fast inverse square root, one instruction set computers, code golf and 4KB demos ...
I think I do understand the technological value of Bitcoin's PoW blockchain, I just think that its only practical use is for a tiny niche. It's the Prolog of consensus algorithms, I'm sure it'll be useful to some but I doubt it's going to be the new C++. You say that "It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique" and it's true but how useful or valuable is that? Is it such a huge problem in our modern society to agree on a sequence of events? Do you often program something and think "man, I wish that there was a way to establish a consensus over points in time which are universally unique" and 1/ there's no other simpler solution to achieve that and 2/ a blockchain could actually solve it? There's only a tiny gap between these two propositions.
But I think at this point talk is cheap and all that needs to be said about the blockchain has been said long ago and multiple times. How many billion of dollars has been poured into "blockchain" technology these past few years, in the form of pre-mined coins or ICOs? How many hundreds of engineers are working on those killer blockchain applications? How many high profile companies have boldly announced blockchain-related tech investments lately? So.... where are the results? How long do we wait for them until we decide that maybe it's not that revolutionary?