Google's specialty has been navigating through the seas of unstructured Web data that comprises the Web and making sense of it. Squared shows that they understand enough about this data to (semi-) automatically return it in a structured form.
Structured data on this scale is considered a bit of a holy grail, especially from the POV of Semantic Web advocates. The cornerstone of the original Semantic Web vision was to have web developers manually annotate semantics into their HTML sites. Now they don't have to.
The real value of Squared is the ability to query this data via an API. Arguably, Freebase already provides this capability, so the value of Squared is questionable, but presumably, Google is more automated and up-to-date or at a larger scale. I'm not sure -- maybe somebody more well-informed than I can comment.
I don't see the similarity at all. Wolfram Alpha gives you detailed information about one thing. Google Squared gives you general info on a things in a category.
This fits right in with Wolfram|Alpha. In order to produce all the amazing comparisons Wolfram|Alpha they had to turn databases, and the public web into structured data sets. What would make this much more then novel is if the collected data sets were made public or licensed for academic use. I'm hesitant to say commercial use because a) they can already do that and probably will, and b) it's the public assisting with collecting the data. One problem with Wolfram Alpha that a user submitted structured data will not solve is the ability to cite sources (or provide some reason to trust the sources). Wolfram Alpha has created a bunch of it's own datasets and academically you just have to "trust them".
It works fine for products, but in that capacity it's just a slightly different layout for a Google Product search. (anyone else still think of that as "froogle"?)
