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?)
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.