Second, FaunaDB's transactional model precludes interactive transactions, whereas SQL transactions are designed for interactive use. Imagine if every transaction was a stored procedure--that's the query structure you'd be looking at. It's certainly possible to do, but stored procedures are sort of an imperative language grafted on to the relational algebra of SQL, and support isn't as standardized as SQL's core.
Third, FaunaDB is a temporal store--you can ask for the state of any query at any point in time, and even mix temporal scopes in the same query expression. SQL doesn't have a first-class temporal model.
In general, using SQL offers advantages, including user familiarity, code reuse, and easier migration from other SQL stores. None of the things FaunaDB does are impossible to express in SQL, and they have been tackled by various DBs' extensions to SQL, but the familiarity+reuse advantages aren't as applicable once you start thinking about the distinct properties of FaunaDB's data model.
Our core use-case is OLTP, and we wanted to address the shortcomings of SQL in this context, such as query performance being highly unpredictable in the presence or not of indexes, whims of the optimizer, etc.
SQL is just not great as an application-level interface: Tables are not a natural fit for many data models (the classic impedance mismatch problem), programmatic composition is difficult. We want to obviate the necessity of an ORM library on top Fauna.
SQL the language is not great for writing complex transactions in, and session transactions require a lot of back and forth between the client and database. We wanted to make it easy to write queries which can encode as much business logic as possible, hence FQL's semantics are a lot closer to a regular programming language.