The name itself is the non-fungible token. You just pick your own ENS name and buy it from the system, much like DNS, though they did add a bit of complexity in an attempt to limit name squatting. (ENS later airdropped a fungible token used for things like voting rights, since this is meant to be a decentralized project and there's no reliable way on Ethereum to identify individual people for voting purposes.)

Ethereum is essentially a database, so certainly centralized databases can do similar things. The point is to do them with decentralization, openness, censorship resistance, and an economic model where users pay the expenses as they go. You may or may not think those things are valuable, but some people do; Ethereum and similar projects fill that niche.

AFAIU the token is only needed in case you want to participate in the voting of governance events, related to the roadmap of the ENS project. You don't need ENS tokens to register or use ENS domains.

IMO the token might be an illegal security indeed; and if that's the case I hope the SEC crushes them. But in the meantime I'll be using ENS names happily as a user and watch the events with popcorn.

> but I don't see how crypto domain names are any different or changes anything.

It will prevent that a big corp with the court on their side redirect your domain-bought-in-a-complete-legit way to them.