As an amateur photographer with a small collection of DSLR and MILC camera lenses at home, I'm quite excited by this: "In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces." In other words, this will allow large-sensor cameras to get a lot smaller and thinner.
Edit: WRONG! As sbierwagen points out[1], even though the press release states that the technology is "completely scalable" [to different wavelenghts of light], it actually works only with wavelengths greater than that of visible light. Too bad :-(
Sorry, read sbierwagen's comment for the bad news: metamaterials like those used to construct this lens are tuned for very specific wavelengths so unless your photographic aesthetic is centered on a very particular colour of IR then you will be out of luck for quite a while.
Metamaterial lenses, if you can make them in visible-light frequencies, might be useful in the microlens array for light-field cameras, where they could act as both the bayer color filter pattern and as focusing element, and where their excellent optical qualities would be really helpful. (The Lytro light-field camera's lousy optical performance is mostly due to the microlens array: they have to be made of conventional materials, and the only lenses that would fit are singlets, which have chromatic abbertation and barrel distortion out the ass.)
Edit: WRONG! As sbierwagen points out[1], even though the press release states that the technology is "completely scalable" [to different wavelenghts of light], it actually works only with wavelengths greater than that of visible light. Too bad :-(
sbierwagen: Thanks for the clarification.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433970