It also has some nice data mining libraries, a library for handling streaming data, some connectivity to external data sources and a library for accessing data stored in its generic "data frames" via SQL. "Data frames" are just an abstraction for a dataset, but they are distributed, and in-memory and/or persistent.
Personally, I like to think of as an engine for data analysis/processing and queries, but different in that it is not really a "database" like you would traditionally consider. It's almost like if you took the SQL data processing engine out of your database and made it really flexible.
Edit: Also, all the functionality of Apache Spark is programmatically accessible in Java, Scala and Python, or through SQL with their Hive/thrift interface.