IBM's Watson is about the level of research that Google or Microsoft do in their regular research labs - i.e., it definitely has a longer-term scope, and it's reasonable to expect that investments in this area will pay off in the next 10-15 years rather than 2-3 years as with normal product development.

It is not blue-sky research, though: it's pretty clear what the value proposition is, who the (potential) customers are, etc.; IBM just put on the publicity upfront with their "winning Jeopardy!" grand challenge to put themselves on the map in a space that is currently dominated by small boutique companies and a very limited numbers of bigger players such as Thomson-Reuters and (partly) Nuance.

Which means that IBM will have an easier time selling to existing enterprise customers who want to get in on this "big data" thing using text analytics (and, frankly, it's also good advertising for their existing data analytics business).