This is also as I understood it. It is possible to have a single hop circuit to an exit, but I don't think you can do single hops to hidden services yet. The hidden service would also have to be explicitly configured to be a single hop hidden service (where it acts as its own rendezvous point).

I don't see any strong evidence that the box itself must be a high speed relay, and in fact, I believe that it is his service that chooses the 3 hop path to the rendezvous point and his Tor daemon that cryptographically verifies that path.