I mean, the financial incentives are structured a bit different, but it's basically what you're describing, no? It's got projects for data collection, inference, training, etc. It's just that the dollar value of the compute contributed to say training is determined by the value of the token rather than as a straight dollar value. But even that is similar to just renting compute directly via fiat currencies given that every major provider of compute fluctuates it's cost based on supply/demand. Consider vast.ai or hetzner in which the cost to rent an h100 is not determined by anything but an auction system in which providers set prices and consumers agree to them.
My understanding is that bittensor is just the same market making where providers choose whether to provide and consumers choose to consume, it's just that you don't set your own price as the price is determined externally via the value of the tau. Which...tbh, fiat currencies fluctuate in buying power as well, if not quite so drastically. Just because the GPU is "still" $1/hr doesn't mean it actually cost as much as it used to given that the underlying value of the dollar changes just as the tau or yen or marc or eth or xrp or whatever does.
And thinking about it more, it's actually really quite similar to mturk in that via mturk you can purchase humans that do surveys, ocr, reviews, UX, etc...Via bittensor you can buy data gathering, training, inference, etc.