I don't know, I think it's helpful. It changes the conversation from being about the access language to being focused on how a technology processes data at scale. Well, almost...
Notice that even with the shift from "NoSQL" to "NewSQL", mentions of joins continues to be conspicuously absent from many of these discussions. So, it's worth noting that many of these NewSQL things are "almost but not quite SQL", hence the value of a new word.
I don't think Spanner is one of these fake-relational databases, it's an ACID datastore that's used as underlying storage for the real RDBMS F1.
From the F1 paper (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38125.html) It looks like it's mostly intended as an improvement to sharded MySQL, by putting the sharding where it belongs, down at the physical storage level, instead of up at the client access level.
Maybe a better buzzword would be NoMySQL (NOracle?)
I didn't really like the NewSQL thing either. I initially thought it must have meant transactional DBs with some first class schema-less features like Postgres has. Nope, it's another one of those phrases or ideas that ReadWriteWeb, the source of the linked to NewSQL definition, is trying to turn into a "big idea". They tried that previously with the Internet of Things (still don't know what the hell that is) as well as their own name, when they referred to the Web 2.0/API hype as the Read/Write Web.
I actually like RWW over TC or Mashable but sometimes I have to tune out some of their pompous prognostication.
I think there should be a term for these new DBMSs, but the problem with NewSQL is that the thing they have in common is not SQL, but consistency and transactions.
