According to a recent news article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanford University critics are now saying that the totipotent cells lines they're developing now (embryonic) " may not yield medical treatments for decades, if ever."
"These companies are essentially taking advantage of people's ignorance and fears to make a buck," said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics---"
Meanwhile, according to the Sacramento Bee, the umbilical cord cells have a splendid therapeutic potential precisely because they don't involve so many genetic markers and thus are potentially useful even for non-related recipients. Supposedly you just have to have about 200 cell lines available to provide a workable match for anybody in the state of California.
Because adult stem cells are limited in what kinds of cells they can develop into. Only way to make them totipotent is to re-program them into embryonic stem cells, which is what these researchers believe they have done, or at least come closer to doing than anyone else has so far.