If you query Google with a Jeopardy style question you won't have a valid answer as the first result, so at least for this particular application, yes it does a better job.
I'm sure there are plenty of reason to believe that this cannot be generalized to real world problem but no one here has given these reasons. So I am not really sure why people claim that it might not live up the the hype. (And I would genuinely like to understand).