It's hard to take realism into account when you're 15, or even just someone in the past. I remember watching a kid's show and someone wrote in and asked their tech expert for the day when we're likely to get a wrist TV like Inspector Gadget and his daughter had. The tech expert was adamant that it was impossible because a (CRT) TV has to be as deep as it is wide. That was around about the time of the first Gameboy, I think, when 8-bit green and grey ruled the portable flatscreen world. Now here we are with smart phones almost as flat and similar in size to a bookmark.
I think what was most unrealistic of me is expecting the technology too quick. If you asked people in 1945 what the world would be like in 1965, they'd say robots and flying cars. Ask someone in 1975 the same thing about 1995, they'd say robots and flying cars. Ask people that today in 2016 about 2036 and they'll say the same thing. Nobody can predict what's really going to happen. Some things are like memes (in the traditional sense) in that we pass the ideas down through the generations and then try to invent them, like robots. And then other things just come out of the blue like smart phones. Very few sci-fi shows predicted smart phones. In fact, if they did they'd problem dismiss them us unrealistic and they'd probably negate 90% of whatever plots they could come up with.
So I agree with you that 15 year old me was being unrealistic to expect replicators in twenty years time (because hindsight is 20/20), and other things from sci-fi, but I think some of those things are just around the corner. They just need that little bit more time. An example of that is VR which will be the big thing by the end of the year.
I think the debate is largely subjective though. The people who say, "Wow, the future is here, the future is now!" are probably really into their smart phones, Segways, streaming services, and whatever else is mentioned in the OP's article, but I'm just not that into most of it. I think the three things that I really appreciate and use, speaking as a 35 year old bloke now instead of me 20 years ago, are broadband internet (I'm still haunted by the ghost of dialup), internet porn (did we really used to buy magazines?) and my Kindle (I struggle to read real books now). Maybe I'd be more into smartphones if I had the social life I had ten years ago, but I don't.