I think you are incorrect and the same cynicism would hold true if RMS and Linus themselves wrote the software. The frustration with this claim is that it's missing a lot of data and it's a claim without a lot of rather important backstory.
- Why was Watson being used for this? (That is, whose idea, whose plan, whose test)
- How many times was Watson wrong? (many others have asked this within the comments)
- Is there a statistical significance to Watson's diagnosis?
- How did Watson narrow it down? That is, did it provide a single conclusion of "it must be this form of leukemia" or was it just the most heavily weighted of several options?
The original ad-walled article from NDTV doesn't add a lot of information either on the specifics, though at least the siliconangle article is correction pointing out the limitations on this (needed a huge DNA repository to work with that would expose a lot of extremely private data, probably wouldn't work well for rarer ailments due to lack of data and inability to understand what it's actually looking at).
It is very good and I am happy that the lady was diagnosed correctly and promptly by Watson, and I do think this is important as something like Watson can cut down immensely on the grunt work that a lot of doctors go through. Already most jump on terminals in the patient room and pull up the relevant information from the hospital's internal libraries, so this just seems like the next natural step for modern healthcare; speed up those libraries.
But the cynicism comes from the lack of information, with how news like this gets portrayed (truthfully, I must credit to SiliconAngle for having a much more reserved approach to the article than the source they relied on), and IBM has been touting Watson as a miracle machine before, and they're certainly not curbing outrageous claims made by less careful publications and journalists.
That is the source of cynicism, and I really do think you'd find it as a result of just about any announcement like this from any person.