SQL in its original incarnations is not Turing complete. It's mainly the bastardized, enterprised, heavily-extended versions built by people who have to sell it that are Turing complete.
To be fair, recursive CTEs are somewhat a blessing when you need to compute transitive closures. It is just unfortunate that they were designed as generative constructs (= you can create and recur on rows out of thin air rather than only products of other finite relations).
You are very correct. I think there is still much to gain even from Turing-complete languages, where the Turing-completeness is relegated to one particular rarely needed construct. Beside the rest of the language being completely analyzable, that one piece that isn't easily stands out as a code smell.
