As an animator, one of the most important things is time-saving. And those cloth movements sure look crazy good for the amount of effort you put in them, and certainly better than the cloth animation I could animate by hand after an hour of work. As such, I would not dismiss it as a novelty. If I need to animate a flapping flag or a character with floaty-wavy hair, especially if my game didn't call for an entire physics engine and my having to hook it up to Spine (this task may vary in amount of effort needed based on the runtime), then I'd go for something like this.
And like anything procedural, I think it'll only look as good as how tasteful the user uses it. And to an extent (definitely for low-fidelity realtime cloth simulation), it's only as performant as how much the user abuses it.
Spine is already a great base for hand-animated things, and definitely make for the good core. Motors on top of it would only make it better.
That said, each motor is a lot of hard work and needs to be considered carefully. I wouldn't expect features like that like... super-soon. Spine's got some exciting features of its own coming up!
As for using the "Creature Animation" system, I may be a little biased, but based on its technical characteristics, I wouldn't use it for my main animations either. But I could see it as useful for certain genres of games where animations are more like setpieces that just stand there, rather than actual actors that have to change states and move around.
For reference, the old discussion is here. : New competitor enters skeletal animation
If you want to describe Creature Animation's merits any more, let's do it there.
