As someone who has one foot in marketing and one foot in development (I am a developer evangelist), here is what's happening.

1. Google's infrastructure is evolving atop MapReduce (FlumeJava/MillWheel).

2. Google's PR decided to call it "not using MapReduce anymore" because in marketing, "beyond <current fad>" sounds really cool.

3. The rest of the world's PR/press/marketing fall for Google's clever PR.

Either way, it is great to see Google making its core technology accessible as part of their PaaS =)