But with multitasking you're working on something at the direct cost of working on something else and indirect cost of time lost switching context. With this, you work on things while other items are being autoworked on (e.g. running a test or a crawl, downloading a file).

Not exactly. As kylec said above it's a different kind of multitasking. But, in a pretty real way there is no way around this kind of multitasking. If you need the results of some long running task you don't stop existing. As a result you are doing something while waiting for those results, even if that 'something' is just staring at the wall.

This is multitasking in the sense that over a period of time you will have worked on multiple things. But it isn't multitasking in the sense that you aren't doing two things at the same instant.