"Pedantry" implies that the distinction is not meaningful.

This is true if you're only paying attention to how this system can be utilized to answer questions posed to it.

This achievement by itself, however, does not do much to push the science of protein folding much further. Those advances will come when people poke, prod, and break the model to develop a unified theory for protein folding.

The "science" of protein folding has a primary goal: to predict the structure of a protein given it's constituent parts.

This is what alphaFold does, and it's been verified to produce results at an apparent accuracy at or above something like X-ray protein crystallography. The advances will come, after these results are validated and accepted by the scientific community as whole, simply when groups start using this technique to immediately access the structure of proteins that in the past would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming or down right impossible to access before, and then use that knowledge to do their work.

You seem to think the first thought a researcher will have after this becomes widely available is, "Oh hey, I can now accurately predict the shape of an arbitrary protein which unlocks untold potential scientific progress on numerous scientific fronts, but the thing I want to spend my time on is trying to replicate the results of the network myself, so I can do it manually thousands of times slower...", which is patently inane.

This model will be an amazing tool toward a science of protein folding, but we have not "solved" protein folding as long as that remains elusive.

Good grief, give it up already.