While Wolfram Alpha is more sophisticated than Google in some ways, Google is better in terms of being practical for a much larger number of people.
In other words, this appears to be a niche product.
Honestly, what's with the battle lines being drawn? The product hasn't come out yet, and basically no one has used it. It seems like it will be an excellent compliment to existing search engines and data sources, but you have to wait and see.
Google has found a sweet spot. And it won't change anytime soon.
What does work and scales is more free form as is the case with the Web today.
And Google makes "free form" work.
edit: the dreaded homonym! I mean they can be meaningfully compared to each other, not that they are the equivalent.
Which is, it turns out, the single most important book about science in the history of the printed word. In fact, it might be more important than the printed word itself. It's a new kind of printed word.
The question is, will Alpha expand our capabilities and thus expand the questions we would ask? Of course you don't have any questions that could be answered by Alpha but not Google; you've been trained out of asking them for over a decade now. Can Alpha change that?
Beat me. I certainly trend skeptical. But an important part of being a skeptic is being able to change your mind with more data, and I am ready to try it out and see. We can't really have an informed opinion on this question until we live with it for a while, which absolutely nobody has.
As an example of its quirkiness, 2 slices of swiss cheese + 1 leaf of lettuce + 1 quarter pound burger gives me a USDA style nutrition label. If I add bacon it says it doesn't know what I mean :-)