Well, the defining aspect of "NoSQL" databases is that they don't use SQL. Generally, they have different semantics (key-value, document, etc.) too, but it's not necessary. Its name tends to make it sound adversarial towards relational databases in general, though.

I'd like to see more relational, column-based databases, with better query languages - I like the relational model, but find SQL to be a bad compromise at best. I think the distinction is lost on a lot of the people caught up in NoSQL hype, though.