Some projects/companies do have complex business processes that involve many services, applications, human interactions for which using a BPM engine, its connectors, its modeling tools can be justified. But this is clearly not for everybody.
Now, to use IBM Process Server, you'll need a license, you'll need an app server to deploy it (at random, WebSphere), some (IBM) machines, maybe some expensive connectors, some licenses for the modeling tools, etc. So I'm not surprised that IBM makes noise about it (even if don't really have the same feeling), selling such a solution must be a good deal for them (not even mentioning the consulting they will add to the bill).
And BPEL, which is a standardized language to describe flows as a sequences of services consuming or producing XML messages, i.e. a generalization of BPM through XML and Web Services, is another brick allowing to promote SOA a bit further, feeding the marketing soup. So, again, there is nothing surprising in the fact that software vendors try to promote it.
Conceptually, I don't think that BPM, BPEL, etc are bad ideas. But as I said, they are not for everybody. If they don't solve anything for you, then using them would be a bad idea. But this does not necessarily invalidate them as concepts.
