Google program manager in good interview with Steve Gillmor of E-week:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1595786,00.asp

Yes, we're certainly excited about RSS. I've actually been using "RSS" as a generic term internally because for a lot of people, it's exactly what you said: That's what you hear about. And it often gets distorted into RSS versus ATOM when RSS itself isn't one thing, it's three or four different things, depending on how you slice it.

I think it was Dave Winer who said that he thinks ATOM will just be considered a flavor of RSS. I thought that was astute because as far as familiarity, people have certainly heard the term "RSS" more. I don't think the name RSS 2.0 versus ATOM versus 1.0, which are completely different animals, is really worthwhile for the vast majority of people to understand what it is, especially when most feed readers will support all of them.