Does it matter? If it wouldn't today, it might tomorrow. If you care about one site, you can't take that risk. He can because he has hundreds of sites to risk.
Replace free blogs with tech buzz and publicity from established blogs and its exactly the same thing in eyes of google. This would never get you banned.
He's just speeding up the ranking process with the free blogs though. His sites would get the traffic eventually because they are so tailored to the topics at hand.
If I were to do this I'd measure the risk/reward of trying to speed up the growth rates, but everything he did previously is probably good enough.
