The original article is about how the Xbox implementation of the Windows printing subsystem should behave, from one of its designers. They considered making it throw an Exception, but decided to instead behave as if printing is supported but there are no printers, so that Windows apps would not crash.
My point was that, as an end user of such apps on Xbox, my preference would have been to have the Xbox OS tell me directly that printing is not supported on this system, even if the app doesn't know about this.
I do not have an Xbox to try but i do not see how these two are mutually exclusive. If you try to use an app to print you wont be able to do that because there are no printers. If you try to add a printer using the Windows API for adding printers (which AFAICT from the article is done via a GUI that Windows itself provides) then the Xbox OS could show an error message that Xbox does not have printer support and once you close it, have the API call the application made tell the application that the user cancelled the request (which is something, according to article, it already does - though i don't have an Xbox to tell if it displays an error message or silently returns the cancel code).
Xbox cannot tell you that there is no printer support before you try to do something related to printing because it doesn't know you may want that. An application that was made for Windows also can't do that because on Windows you can add printers (even fake ones that print to PDFs, no hardware needed).
An application asks the OS for the list of printers. The question is what should an OS with no support for printing do. The article says it should return an empty list. My point is that it should pop up a notification directly to the user telling them "hey, the app you're using is trying to access printing, but that's not supported on this machine" or some other language like this (it could then return an empty list).
Trying to enumerate printers doesn't imply that the application will use them, it could easily be part of the initialization of some framework, shared library, language runtime, or whatever. Unless there is some actual user interaction, there is no way for the OS to know what the user is trying to do. It is best to err on the side of not making assumptions.
My point was that, as an end user of such apps on Xbox, my preference would have been to have the Xbox OS tell me directly that printing is not supported on this system, even if the app doesn't know about this.