We should celebrate this for what it is: another brick in the wall that we’re building to achieve practical quantum computing systems.

That's the best-case scenario. It remains possible that topological qubits, even if they are theoretically achievable, will turn out to be a dead end engineeringwise. Presumably competing quantum computing labs think this is likely, since they're not working on topological qubits; only Microsoft thinks they'll end up being important.

Yes, just like putting two bricks onto each other is a first step to the moon.