The author says we've been robbed of 3 John Carmack games, but he must have forgot about id Software's iPhone games. He's been playing with the platform for a while now, and has been shipping smaller games with a fast turn around for a few years now.
He actually stated in an interview that his contract requires Bethesda to allow him to work on mobile projects every year. He enjoys mobile development because it reminds him of what game programming was like before the $100 Million budgets existed.
http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcs_%26_Elves
Here's an interview with him talking about iPhone developmenet:
http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.h...