If those are your sources, then it's understandable that you don't have all of the facts. Try the actual technical journals in chemical analysis (which is where ALL these techniques originated). I'm old enough that I watched the birth of these technologies, long before they ever made their way to Scientific American. Yeah, they're smaller and more powerful today, but that was and is inevitable as technology improves. What matters is the initial discovery/invention. I suspect that the Wall Street Journal reporters are equally as ignorant of the lineage of these items.
But if the Obama administration gets their way with "national health care", you can kiss any future such developments good-bye, because the typical development route of all these methods has been 1)physics, 2)chemical analysis, 3) medical analysis, 4) "ancillary applications" (like art). Stage 3 is where the big bucks get infused that make the methods sufficiently automated that they can be used by non-professionally trained operators.
No matter how 'inevitable' progress in imaging technology may be, it is notable that such progress has been achieved and that researchers are widely and productively applying it to ancient manuscripts.
I am confident though that appreciation of, for example, any newly recovered plays by Sophocles would not require reading the 'actual technical journals' so as to know the history, chemistry, and physics of the multi-spectral imaging technology by which the plays were recovered. The development of such technology is of interest but is another subject entirely.