I think the biggest win for pipelining in SQL is the fact that we no longer have to explain that SQL execution order has nothing to do with query order, and we no longer have to pretend that we're mimicking natural language. (That last point stops being the case when you go beyond "SELECT foo FROM table WHERE bar LIMIT 10".)
No longer do we have to explain that expressions are evaluated in the order of FROM -> JOIN -> ON -> SELECT -> WHERE -> GROUP BY -> HAVING -> ORDER BY -> LIMIT (and yes, I know I'm missing several other steps). We can simply just express how our data flows from one statement to the next.
(I'm also stating this as someone who has yet to play around with the pipelining syntax, but honestly anything is better than the status quo.)
No longer do we have to explain that expressions are evaluated in the order of FROM -> JOIN -> ON -> SELECT -> WHERE -> GROUP BY -> HAVING -> ORDER BY -> LIMIT (and yes, I know I'm missing several other steps). We can simply just express how our data flows from one statement to the next.
(I'm also stating this as someone who has yet to play around with the pipelining syntax, but honestly anything is better than the status quo.)