Theres some truth to it. Despite how revolutionary quantum computing could be, there still aren't a lot of quantum algorithms that are asymptotically faster than their classical counterparts. The two important ones are Shor's factorization, which can factor an integer in O((log n)^3) time, and Grover's Search, which can search an unsorted collection in O(sqrt(n)) time.

Grover's search is pretty amazing though - a lot of problems can be reduced to some form of search in the solution space, and sqrt(n) search will let us say "fuck it, lets just brute-force it" to much bigger search spaces. I could see that being applied to the example you mentioned - searching through a list of possibilities very quickly.