Comment Re:It means you jumped on the latest bandwagon (Score 1) 94
Those "prominent" people are also people who have no relation to the field of technology which is where data science has it's focus (precisely because the volumes of data that require new scientific effort can only be handled by computers).
Most journalists couldn't tell you the difference between a neurologist and neurosurgeon either, but it doesn't mean that they're not distinct roles.
A handful of journalists and an old school medical statistician still doesn't exactly provide a compelling list of weight to counter the who's who of technology business and academia. We're talking literally thousands of the best minds in the businesses against a bunch of people in a wholly different business and a tiny handful of dissenters.
Data science is multidisciplinary, it requires you to be a polymath. Any statistician who believes they're a data scientist needs to show they have the pre-requisite knowledge outside of statistics coming from computer science and non-statistical mathematics (i.e. graph theory). Statistics is obviously a key discipline in data science, but it's most definitely not the only discipline (even gweihir recognised this with his mention of CS).
A statistician can analyse a dataset and pull information from it, but they cannot deal with a dataset so large that anything other than bespoke hardware and software setups can handle it (i.e. the petabytes of data CERN produces), to do that, you need data scientists. You may find that data scientists then pass on subsets of that data, or data they have resolved from that data to statisticians to work on, but the statisticians themselves wont have that knowledge to handle the data set, and if they do then they can start calling themselves data scientists because they know more than just statistics, they know statistics and a bunch of other disciplines in enough depth to be actual data scientists.
Long story short, you can be a statistician without being a data scientist, but a data scientist will need statistics and a whole bunch of other things, at that point why is a data scientist just a statistician rather than just a computer scientist, or just a mathematician, or just a low end physicist? You can't just pick one of these fields arbitrarily, they're all as important to the role hence why you need a new term to encompass the required knowledge.