You can't quote the EOS legal docs to determine the functionality... basically that statement was to prevent lawsuits so they are saying, "EOS does nothing, and is worth nothing." This is an untrue statement, but they make that radical statement to protect themselves from future lawsuits, especially in odd cases like the project failing after the ICO. If they make no guarantee the token will do anything and if the project fails, they can point to that line of legal docs and say, "We never said it would do anything."

In fact, the EOS token will do something on the proposed system they are building. What the EOS token does is it has 'emission'. Unlike Ethereum, EOS will not have any Gas. EOS tokens have emission. Emission is not EOS tokens.

What emission permits a person to do is to run an application on EOS. App developers in the future will be able to calculate the quantity of on-going emission needed to fund their smart application on EOS. Then they can either buy emission from other token holders that have extra emission (rental model), or they can buy enough EOS to permanently fund their EOS application indefinitely (asset model). If a contract application on EOS takes 10 tokens to permanently fund, then that developer could perma-fund the contract for themselves and users by simply investing in 10 EOS tokens.

This makes EOS free for users, and very convenient for app developers in the future.

This issue was answered by Dan on the presentation he gave on EOS. Ignore the legal lingo is my suggestion. My guess is many of you are not in the USA. In the USA, everything we buy has legal disclaimers on it which all US citizens promptly ignore. That stuff only matters in terms of protecting people from lawsuits, often what it says is false for all practical purposes until people arrive inside a courtroom.