Most transformer models require that the data is euclidian (e.g. a sequence or image). Non-Euclidean deep learning methods like graph neural networks (GNNs) are much more general and can accept almost arbitrarily structured data (social networks, point clouds, trees, etc). You can actually model transformers as a special case of GNNs[1].
What do you mean by useful? GNNs get better performance than other methods on lots of real tasks. It's the same as CNNs being useful in practice despite not having more "theoretical" power than MLPs.
[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/transformers-are-graph-neural...