"Whereas semiconductors today..." Shouldn't there be some sort of follow up comparing Friedman's semiconductor to the semiconductors today? You guy seriously need to work on your editing. You are losing as a reader.

"Friedman said he has developed a prototype chip that is capable of operating at 1.4 GHz. "

uh.. well that great for friedman... i assume this chip has something todo with 3d.. wouldnt know it from the article tho...

poorly written indeed

" Shouldn't there be some sort of follow up comparing Friedman's semiconductor to the semiconductors today?"
It sounds like a proof of concept to me. The purpose is not to compete with proven chips on performace. The information that would be appropiate is; surface area and/or volume!, manufacture process, thermal design point(TDP) / heat dissapation properties.
If we wanted to go all out... a full benchmark would be nice. It would include compatiblity testing, design diagrams, rate to failure, microarchitecture ...

I imagine 3d dies will be almost impossible for the R&D department at a chipmaker to do surgery on defective dies, while in the research phase.

The secret is to make tiny 3D processors, comparable to Atoms. If you have a defective processor, no need to do surgery - just throw it away and grab another of those 2,000 chips that came on the wafer. :P