The is_a(china, country) example suddenly made Alpha "click" for me: it's the "general knowledge" database that you feed to semantic web programs to correlate their domain-specific knowledge to.
Yeah, that's at least how I saw it. And I think that message is being lost in the rush to see it as the next Powerset. I know Powerset and NLP generally gets lots of hype, but I think that sort of positioning for them would be a death sentence.