The presence and use of column families is only half of the puzzle - it doesn't strictly imply that the execution engine is capable of working in a vectorized columnar style (which is necessary for competitive OLAP).
...it seems the distinction here is that the vectorization is only present in the execution layer and not the storage layer also. I would guess that from a storage perspective, even with column families in play, everything is being streamed out of sorted a LSM engine regardless. So there isn't additionally some highly-tuned buffer pool serving up batches of compressed column files etc.
Indeed. As I commented alsewhere this is just about the general design. It is not targeting OLAP in this case (even though I do believe cockroach employs vectorization for reads)