"Quantum" Image Processing
Its because a quantum computer can effectively look through all possible values at once, because the bits its using to search can take all values. Basically it can search a database of size n in much less than n queries.
Having read the NIPS demo paper that Google reference I have a few points to make. First they don't actually use the quantum computer to do image recognition, they use the quantum computer to devise the rule set which is then used by normal computers to search images. Second, their main results come from the simulation of the quantum system on normal computers rather than running it on D-Wave's hardware (as that hasn't got enough functioning qubits yet). Third, there doesn't seem to be all that much computing going on in the quantum computer, as they just initialise it to a flat state and then slowly poke it until its working on a similar problem to the one they want to solve, at which point they let it decohere and read off what the result is.
Still, its damn cool.