Its an emergent academic field in the way that bioinformatics was a few years ago; "data science" is a name for something that's been taught in less breadth and depth as parts of other academic disciplines (including parts of the "research methods" curriculum in the life and social sciences, parts of statistics, parts of computer science), but certainly its as legitimate an area of focus as the disciplines its that parts of it have been hosted in. There's more than one way to divide up intellectual pursuit, and a number of ways that have cut across the previously predominant divisions have been coming to the fore recently. This is, really, a good thing.