Add sharding, rebalancing, replication and partition tolerance to the mix... I know some nosql dbs don't support that, but horizontal scalability is the benefit you should expect for dropping sql

Cassandra actually has a strongly typed table schema for the most part if you are predominately using CQL. Also Hive requires a schema for querying data off HDFS.

There really isn't any such thing as SQL/NoSQL any more.

It still is "databases that do not do SQL".

Having a SQL-esque query language is very far from the implications of "doing SQL":

- Any external software that relies on SQL (not a similar language that looks like but it isn't) won't work.

- Any tool which expects SQL and expects SQL-based drivers (like JDBC, for instance) won't neither work.

- SQL is a huge standard with a significant number of features. This semi-SQL interfaces, at best, implement a tiny part of that used to be SQL 92, a standard by the Windows 3.1 era. So not a big deal if you compare with modern SQL implementations in databases like PostgreSQL.

So I think they are still very bound by the definition that they don't do SQL.