I wouldn't call it "useless". It's less useful than the internal distributed version, sure, but it does offer value: a drop dead simple build file syntax that can be learned in 15 minutes and then just works.
Simple, repeatable builds, almost no learning curve. I do agree that this is a vastly less potent value proposition than "build your C++ in minutes instead of hours", but it's a start. I think Google will offer the distributed cloud piece for this at some point. They'd be stupid not to.
It takes years for a new build format to be widely used.
There are many more important thing holding up wider adoption before the lack of distributed support becomes a issue: Windows support, how hard it is to get working on ARM, etc etc.