It's not. Just a different name (which unfortunately adds more confusion).

PITR on say RDS is going to be a fair bit slower than this, I'd imagine.

PITR is a lot slower especially if there are large transactions in the binlog.

This is amazon's model. A cobbled together team of 1-3 low level engineers takes a feature of some open source software package or the entire package itself, wraps it in an ill-conceived web layer or existing service and makes a big announcement about it. Almost no one uses it, but there will be lots of conference talks about how great it is.