Fair enough I'd say :) The concern is understandable, but I honestly think Pipes is different.

The operations Pipes can do are at the same time very generic and very targeted. It's stuff like "Download this url" and "Filter this feed for that word", and it gives you a selection of blocks like extract and insert with which you can manipulate the data in the pipe (or the feed, depending how you look at it) a bit more freely. There is surprisingly a lot that can be done with that, especially with a replace block that supports regex, but it's not a deep abstraction layer above things that are not mappable to rather small operations.