You say they "just copied the genome" like that's easy to do. This is a landmark because they synthesized the entire genome using nothing but the sequence stored in a computer, much more difficult than replicating a pre-existing piece of DNA.
It's fairly likely that every life-form that currently exists in this planet has a common ancestor that self-assembled billions of years ago. Your genetic code is the result of a huge amount of cycles of copies (and mutations) of that common ancestor's DNA.
The life form that Venter created is separate from that lineage - its genetic code was synthesized from basic building blocks, not copied from an ancestor (at least in a biochemical sense; the information content was indeed copied, but that's another hurdle).
Whether or not this makes it "artificial life" depends on your definition of "life", and there's a surprising amount of controversy there.
I think it's pretty accurate. There was only information to begin with, and now there is life. It happens that information was gained from a pre-existing cell, but this new cell has nothing to do with the cell it's derived from, it's made completely by the work of humans. That has never happened before.
Edit: However, I know what you mean about it not being 100% artificial, as in completely designed by humans: Maybe "synthetic life" is better?
Further edit: More than using a pre-existing genome, what makes it not completely artificial is that they had to put their DNA into another cell, basically cloning using synthesized DNA rather than natural DNA.
I don't know about that, to date genetic engineering consisted of taking DNA from one organism, isolating a desired trait from another organism and using a gun or splicer to "inject" that code into preexisting DNA. These guys scaffold the DNA from the basic building blocks. There is a huge difference. Personally to me they are both artificial life as neither occurred via random selection, it is just one used a current organisms DNA as the building block, while the other used the bare elements to put together all of the DNA. The value of the second approach is that you don't get all of the junk that comes with harvested DNA you only get what you specify.
Consider natural and artificial vanilla flavoring; it's more technical usage than misleading.
(Natural vanilla is harvested from beans, resulting in vanillin, etc. Artificial vanilla is synthesized from e.g., bacteria, and in specific cases molecular synthesis.)
More than that: an OS is millions of lines of code. The hardware is a hundred thousand. But cells! They have orders of magnitude more wiring than all the bits of DNA put into them. I liken it to a vast machine that can create either 1) a man or 2) a mouse. The dna programs the switch: man or mouse. Pretty trivial in comparison.
