It's not a better way of talking about language: it's a better way of talking about how to build a computationally useful model of language with features primar

It's not a better way of talking about language: it's a better way of talking about how to build a computationally useful model of language with features primarily extracted from data than building language explicitly in is. Pretty much by definition. Google's paper isn't talking about language -- it's talking about how to tune a generalized computational device to build a computationally useful model from a large corpus of data. Of course it sounds different than talking about language, per se.