Whether progress is incremental is an ill defined question. I don't consider "super human translation" to be incremental. The key point here is that deep learning has produced significant results. I'm not sure why you care to argue semantics.
Better translation of European languages (which wasn’t a totally unsolved problem anyway) doesn’t seem to be something that really lives up to the hype.
Particularly as the article cited doesn’t seem to back up its statements very well.
So... anything else?
The original blog:
https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for...
Is better suggests deep learning resulted in maybe 10% improvement. Isn’t as good as human in all cases.
Also, you didn't answer the question.