Honestly I think people's assumption that graph databases must be better in representing binary relations might be a bit optimistic. After all there's no reason relational databases (named after the n-ary relationships that tables represent) couldn't handle binary relations.
The one thing that's definite is that SQL is a bad choice for particular kinds of queries, though most graph databases don't seem to go much further than improving (?) the syntax a little bit and adding transitive closure (which is also present in several SQL databases). A few graph databases do allow for more complex (even arbitrary) inference, but this somehow never seems to make the headlines.