I wouldn't say the model is fundamentally flawed. Looking at the roots of NoSQL (which I believe was first popularized by Google's BigTable), the original intent of a NoSQL database is to allow redundant storage of a lot of data on a DFS.
They're meant for situations where you have data that doesn't fit well into a relational database model, and you need to run BIG queries (think PageRank) over the entire data in a fault-tolerant way. For instance thinking about PageRank, how many discrete data elements are in a single web page? This is "higher-order" data that in a relational database might have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of columns per row.
Of course there are also in-memory transactional databases called NoSQL databases which are meant to be replacements for the traditional relational data store, but those are a very different beast from the original NoSQL data model.
That was bad and sensationalistic wording from my side. I should have said more clearly that I meant this in the context of modeling common business domains, not for specialized tasks that don't fit a relation model efficiently.
They're meant for situations where you have data that doesn't fit well into a relational database model, and you need to run BIG queries (think PageRank) over the entire data in a fault-tolerant way. For instance thinking about PageRank, how many discrete data elements are in a single web page? This is "higher-order" data that in a relational database might have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of columns per row.
Of course there are also in-memory transactional databases called NoSQL databases which are meant to be replacements for the traditional relational data store, but those are a very different beast from the original NoSQL data model.