it still has some 'spam' aspects.
on one hand you're asked to spam because it's the most efficient way of healing 'spamming heal, or PoH with 0 overhealing'.
however as soon as the incoming damage overtakes what spamming can deal with you're forced into using other abilities, holywords, flash heal, gheal, CoH, penance blah blah
I've noticed that the more intense the damage is the less spammy the healing becomes.
Looking at 25man logs (I've afraid I have very limited knowledge on 10mans in cata) I have noticed a trend for PoH to be making up ~40% of the total healing done for both priest specs, whilst that may seem spammy I also notice that very often the 2nd 'heal' is 'other' which in WoL terms means every other heal that didn't make top5 combined. this is good news! we're not spamming.
Taking a trip down memory lane to look at WOTLK log reports we saw disc priests dominating and they only used 2 spells, ever. PW:S made up about 80% of their healing, DA made up the rest.
It really wasn't that uncommon to find a disc priest ONLY used 1 spell throughout an entire encounter. IMO blizzard have done a good job in moving away from that.
There will always be some aspect of 'spamming' because 1 spell is going to be 'best' (either efficiency or throughput) the trick is knowing how much healing people really need at any given time and if you can afford the mana to do it. The better you know a fight the less spammy it will become.
Feel free to disagree of course