Back in the early 80's, the Radio Shack store at the local mall had a fishbowl full of alligator clips marked "party favors" (roach clips).

I like Wolfram|Alpha's capabilities much better when I'm not fighting their "natural language" parsing. The simplest way to get "What time is it?" on W|A isn't to type that question, just do:

now

More impressively, Wolfram|Alpha can do this:

airspeed of an unladen European swallow in furlongs per fortnight

Google also provides top-ranked sites where this is calculated, but W|A gives a definite answer along with assumptions.

On the other hand, you can ask W|Q:

Phase of the moon on the day Elvis was born

and it will show and tell you (waxing crescent). Google would only do that if someone had written that down on a page somewhere with sufficient page rank to show up higher than semi-random occurrences of all of the words.

Of course, there is a simple answer to the Google vs. W|A controversy (and one that Wolfram should agree to) - license Google to provide a prominent link to W|A for search phrases that look like they might be appropriately solved by it.