I'd tend to agree the latter but not the propaganda since the Westerns indeed admit this achievement.
Yeah, what is the advantage if not turing complete anyway?
A computation model doesn't have to be Turing complete to be useful in practice. Consider a language where all programs must halt - all loops must be bounded, and recursion is not allowed - you can still solve a lot of problems with a language like this, but you cannot say, run Brainfuck, as such a language is not Turing complete.
What's the advantage of the abacus or the Enigma machine? Or any of the many Turing-incomplete machines that were built before fully general computers in the 1940s-50s.