Asimo seems quite a bit more advanced overall than those robots. They are designed for quite specific purposes and domain - it's hard to tell but they also don't seem autonomous. With Asimo, Handa is going for a general purpose robot that can emulate a human while Boston Dynamic appears to be going for more specific military needs with things like BigDog.
From what I learned from a BD engineer, Japanese legged robotics use mostly static equilibrium in contrast with the (more advanced?) dynamic balancing of US and European robots. Asimo might look cute, but if you compare the gait of any of the popular MIT, Boston Dynamics or CMU robots to the Japanese, you soon notice that the latter don't look very natural or adequate to unpredictable terrain.
That's true enough, but only the military and EMS need robots that can instantly handle unfamiliar terrain. Meanwhile, the Japanese are most of the way towards a consumer product, since the interior of a building is highly predictable.
Good point, but if you don't need to handle unstructured terrain, you might just as well put the robot on wheels. The humanoids robot Justin from DLR [1] for instance has an omnidirectional wheeled platform that even allows for adaptive foot print. The only current advantage for ASIMO that I see at the moment, is that it doesn't have to take the elevator but can use stairs.
