Well, somebody could spend some time sorting this. But I think we can establish a few things.

First, Henry Sully was indeed hot stuff. In Henry Nelthropp's Treatise on Watch and Clockwork he gives a sketch of Sully, after his attempt to set up a big clock-making shop in France had failed :

....Being now at liberty, he applied himself seriously to the construction of a timekeeper to measure the longitude at sea, and in 1723 completed his task. On the 7th of September, 1726, a satisfactory report was made at Bordeaux, and immediately he published a work...In this work Sully gives the plan for his timekeeper: the principles which guided him in its construction; his experiments;the beautiful applications of rollers to the balance pivots to reduce the effects of friction...In July 1728 this highly-intellectual man lost his life

Sully's treatise is here and it does in fact talk about roller-bearings...but it also talks about regular jewel bearings. It talks about roller bearings for big clocks ( page 334). Which makes sense: roller bearings would be good for heavy loads, jewel bearings for the very small loads of watch gears. I am not not sure if the NASA writer used Nelthropp, or mistook Sully's description of watch gears, "entre les rubies perces lesquels roulot les pivots" to mean "between the pierced rubies in which roll the pivots" instead of the more correct "between the pierced rubies in which spin the pivots". My French is only utilitarian, but reading Sully's treatise ( and Le Roy's appendix to it) I am not sure if the longitude-winning design was the one with roller bearings in it. That one did indeed seem to be substantial, with pendulums like Harrison's first ones, but I think roller bearings were meant for something really big, like a town clock, with a correspondingly heavy balance wheel.

EDIT It might be worth adding, here, that Harrison would finally drop the idea of pendulums in favor of something more like a large watch, with a balance wheel spring; there was a problem with any sizable pendulum resonating with the motion of the ship, and the swing being affected. A small balance wheel, like in a watch, cycled too fast to be affected. Sully , on the other hand, seemed to have some sort of special gimbal mount that would keep the clock from being rolled around.

According to Nelthropp, Sully was a sore point with the French, who felt he should have gotten his just rewards from the English. But he died before he submitted anything to the Board of Longitude, and his pupil, Le Roy, didn't submit it either. Given the difficulties that Harrison had ( well told by Sobel) of trying to get his reward with an existing, fully-functioning and proven chronometer, it is hard to imagine the Board being impressed by just a description in a book written by an author who was no longer alive. The Board would continue to grant prizes for chronometers ( substantial ones to three more makers, Mudge, Arnold and Arnold , Jr ) , but not to Sully- or his heirs. By 1885 apparently the award was too small to be worth the bother for any clock/watch maker to compete for it, for any reason other than pride.

Harrison is normally credited with inventing the caged ball bearing, at least on what's called "H3", his third chronometer design. I have never run across a description of how he came to do it, but of course without the balls being confined in a cage, it would have been maddeningly difficult to assemble the clock without having them always getting loose and dropping on the floor.

Besides Nelthropp, David Glasgow's 1885 Watch and Clock Making has good descriptions of the evolution of clock and watch design. And a great history of both clocks and the way people thought about time is David Landes' Revolution in Time