Yes, but I don't think your refuted my point. 16 bits (96dB SNR) is pretty good for an 18MHz signal processing system. Comparing it to a 18MHz 8bit AVR with a 10bit, 15ksps ADC is probably missing what makes this potentially cool.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a pretty niche thing that doesn't have a lot of applications. DSP is great, and it's not going to get overthrown anytime soon. But if you were looking for things that make signal processing in the analog domain exciting to think about, I stand by high equivalent bit depth for the processing bandwidth and power consumed as a valid advantage.
16 bits is roughly 100dB, and achieving more than that is usually a serious engineering challenge. I'd like to see crosstalk rejection numbers for this system.
There are people working in the other direction, trying to use analogue for implementing the calculations of neural nets, and they tend to target the equivalent of 8 bit depth.