This is a much more profound insight than is readily apparent. It is really easy to build a Turing machine -- except for the tape. You could probably build a universal TM is a lot less than 930 gates. All hardware design is essentially nothing more than taking common design patterns and moving off the tape and into the engine so that the tape can be more compact and the machine can run faster.

This is the main reason I personally find actual hardware re-implementations of old machines to be fairly uninteresting. There's really very little sport in it once you know the trick.