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One thing's for sure, WordPress is a highly configurable CMS that's useful for all sorts of non-bloggy things. I'm using it, for example, to expose a part of my domain portfolio to the web (see sig).
However, I disagree that "blog" is defined by the method of presentation rather than the content provided. I believe that a "blog" has a specific social definition, having to do with the pacing at which new information is presented (roughly daily, for a period of months or years), the order in which it is presented (most recent displayed first) and the community to which it is presented (two overlapping sets consisting of blog readers and other bloggers, with random searchers making up a third weak set that may indeed be where the money comes from despite not being part of your blogging community). If you don't have community interaction (which includes links to other community members, and feedback from other community members in the form of comments and/or inbound links) you're not blogging, although you may indeed be using blog software to present pictures, news headlines, porn galleries, search engine marketing, updates about your business, or whatever.
IMO it's a mistake to confuse the tool (blog software, usually WordPress, a highly versatile and easily configurable free CMS) with the work (a blog, if that's what you use the tool to produce, or any of a wide variety of non-blog sites that are easily produced using that same CMS). People are forever building adult sites with blog software, discovering that the result sucks, going "all that blog hype was bullshit", and never understanding that they didn't have a blog because they didn't understand what blogs were and didn't "get" what makes blogs special and specially profitable.
None of which undermines your main point, with which I agree: there are a ton of useful, innovate, and profitable ways to use blog software.
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