I think the thing that would surprise a researcher from ten years ago is mainly the use of graphics cards for general compute. The shader units of 2005 would only be starting to get to a degree of flexibility and power where you could think to use them for gpgpu tasks.
I got my first consumer gpu in 1997 and was thinking about how to do nongraphical tasks on it almost immediately. I didn't come up with anything practically useful back then and they were much more limited but I don't think someone from 2006 would find it surprising to hear that this was a thing.
I don't know... CUDA was released almost 9 years ago. So I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that cutting edge researchers from 10 years ago would have been thinking about using GPU's that way.
