disclaimer: I used to work for Couchbase, and am still involved in the CouchDB community
'Magic Scaling' isnt the only reason people use alternative data stores such as Mongo (or Couch), in fact as shown it can often turn out to be a really bad idea to do so. I wouldnt still be interested in CouchDB if it was just 'do stuff a bit differently from mysql and everything will work at scale' type database.
Schemaless, Native JSON, master master replication, HTTP API are all features which can be hugely beneficial to particular applications over tradition RDBMS' (those were only a few features and they were probably bias towards CouchDB because I know that better)
Right, the schemaless and native JSON are the main reason I switched my products to MongoDB. Scalability is not an issue for 99% of the projects i've worked on.
Easier mapping between my domain model (I mainly use Smalltalk) and the persistence is a huge win.
'Magic Scaling' isnt the only reason people use alternative data stores such as Mongo (or Couch), in fact as shown it can often turn out to be a really bad idea to do so. I wouldnt still be interested in CouchDB if it was just 'do stuff a bit differently from mysql and everything will work at scale' type database.
Schemaless, Native JSON, master master replication, HTTP API are all features which can be hugely beneficial to particular applications over tradition RDBMS' (those were only a few features and they were probably bias towards CouchDB because I know that better)