The nascent computational paradigm of quantum reservoir computing presents an attractive use of near-term, noisy-intermediate-scale quantum processors. To understand the potential power and use cases of quantum reservoir computing, it is necessary to define a conceptual framework to separate its constituent components and determine their impacts on performance. In this manuscript, we utilize such a framework to isolate the input encoding component of contemporary quantum reservoir computing schemes. We find that across the majority of schemes the input encoding implements a nonlinear transformation on the input data. As nonlinearity is known to be a key computational resource in reservoir computing, this calls into question the necessity and function of further, post-input, processing. Our findings will impact the design of future quantum reservoirs, as well as the interpretation of results and fair comparison between proposed designs.
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