This passage really distills it down to the essence of what happened: "Despite skepticism in the neuroscience community, Markram won over the people who really mattered: funders at the European Commission, who seem to have looked less closely at the proposal's scientific feasibility than at its potential economic and political payoff."
One can see similar problems in smaller effort by Palm Founder Jeff Hawkin's efforts to jump-start algorithmically oriented neuroscience research with his book On Intelligence and his company Numenta.
With all the failures pretty visible now, I'd like to say I think there's some validity in seeing if one can extract a broad vision out of all the disparate threads of neuroscience research.
There have been events in the history of science when outsiders walked in and saw a forest instead of a lot of trees - see Craig Venter, Alfred Wegener and others (and there have been many more cranks who claimed to the same of course). Making some effort to see if that kind of approach can gel is worth some effort in the study of the brain, a field whose complexity is so huge that gradual, iterative research could continue in places for a thousand years and not answer basic questions.