Calculating Batting Averages with Riak's Map/Reduce

HEre's what I don't get. We see map/reduce posts all the time, like it's some fantastic new technology.

Reading up - it seems to me that map & reduce are standard functional programming patterns (or whatever you call them) that just happend to lend themselves very well to distributed computing.

mapping and reduction have existed in functional programming forever, no? There's no magic there.