Lower bounds for quantum circuits using the geodesic framework
Not exactly what you are looking for, I know, but geodesics have been used to prove optimal state transfer rates in Ising spin chains (see arXiv:0705.0378). I'm not sure how related this is to Nielsen's approach, as I haven't read that particular paper, but I remember thinking this was quite a neat result when it first came out. Basically this is the minimum time to transfer a quantum state from one end of a linear array of qubits to the other. It is a very simple problem, but in the above paper they show that the transfer can be achieved significantly faster than was previously believed (although of course there is still a linear scaling, with the speed-up in the constant).