No, nowhere remotely close. This is just a matter of trying to precisely characterize the state space; there are upper and lower bounds that have been established, but it's an interesting computational problem to precisely characterize exactly how many legal positions there are.
I think that there's not much utility in this work beyond "it's an interesting challenge," but, well, there's not much utility in any game beyond "it's an interesting challenge."
Government funding, collaboration with outside companies and IP. Looks like John Tromp was affiliated with CWI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrum_Wiskunde_%26_Informatic...), which is funded by the Netherlands gov. Take a look at the "spin off companies" section in the wikipedia article. Often government funded research organisations turn some of their research into products to help fund themselves.
I think that there's not much utility in this work beyond "it's an interesting challenge," but, well, there's not much utility in any game beyond "it's an interesting challenge."