Babbage's design does, in principle, embody the Universal Turing Machine concept. But in 1945 this freedom to think of programs as data was in practice the liberating change on which fifty years of subsequent development has rested. New developments will still rest upon the concept of computability defined by Turing in 1936. The Turing Machine will remain fundamental. Even when we have quantum computers.
History is on the side of the winner.
In 1945 Alan Turing could have felt like a winner. He was taken on by the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, in London suburbs. His detailed plan for an electronic computer, with a visionary prospectus for its capacities, was accepted in March 1946. Everything seemed to be going for it. Well, not quite everything.