A Merkle root including previous Merkle roots may have been innovative when Surety started, but while its required in bitcoin its not a key feature of what defines a Blockchain.
But I think we can agree that a Merkle chain like this would be sufficient for most of the things people are trying to use blockchains for recently, which certainly says something.
- it's a distributed consensus system (often around "blocks", but e.g. iota is not)
- it's a chain of hashes to prevent mutation (around "chains")
Very (very) few things benefit from distributed consensus IMO. And not all altcoins use blocks at all. So I tend to lean towards hash-chains. Publicly-verifiable immutability is useful in quite a lot of real-world scenarios.