If you check out the beginning of the video link (I had it fast forwarded towards the end) you can see that it is doing an awful lot more than that, and in 2013.
A pick and place is 2-axis movement with a suction cup. This is controlling a robot arm with a ton of degrees of freedom and developing paths for moving through all those degrees of freedom without hitting anything and using internal models to do so.
I suppose in some very broad sense it looks similar, but the difficulty of x-y + down is way, way lower than what you're seeing in that video.
