I personally feel Watson was an extremely clever marketing boondoggle. If you think of it, machine learning, neural networks and AI were just making a return into the public mind around the time they announced Watson.

I think somebody thought if they "humanized" AI by making it seem like it was a character, it would make AI seem all that much more closer to the dream.

On the face of it, not a horrible idea, but applied to what was essentially a bunch of separate algorithms.. pretty misleading, but that's just an opinion.