I really don't think bitcoin's scripting language is powerful enough to do anything of the sort, unless the gambling game was something along the lines of: "First one to claim the money, gets it!"
The ethereum contract stuff does look powerful enough, but suffers from big UX problems and can't run fully unattended (afaik).
Not only that, Ethereum will mostly have scalability issues in the future especially on the more complex dapps. And as network activity increases expect those dapps to run errors and such. I think further research is needed on what Ethereum is attempting to create.
Although researchers can use and experiment with the platform now, I think they might have gotten discouraged due to the recent DAO hack.