Oh, I agree with that. But I think the perception of (mock) organization it provides and its visual similarity to graph paper is what draws people to it. The power of spreadsheets are in the computations, and of course people use it for that, but I bet there are just as many spreadsheets that contain entirely static content as there exist spreadsheets that actually use spreadsheets as more than just a glorified grid formatting engine. I've seen people do calculations with desk calculators and then type the results into their spreadsheets. It does let non-programmers define their own computations, but I wouldn't call what non-programmers do with it to be programming, "computation for non-programmers", most definitely. I believe this may come down to how the both of us define programming, however.

Interesting contrast, though, is the relative avoidance of accounting ledgers, which spreadsheets are a closer cousin to than they are to graph paper.