Even worse, he lists "brainfuck" as a technology that's easier to use outside of the big-company matrix. There is no such thing as "brainfuck". There are various dialects and derivative languages. There is the object-oriented programming language which solves its problem excellently and whose limitations are well-known and sometimes very painful, especially when dealing with huge amounts (multi-node) of data. There are other models of computation with different trade-offs. There is no such thing as "brainfuck". It is not a technology or skill or anything else. There's Toadskin and Smallfuck and Doublefuck and various others, but there isn't a "BrainFuck". I can't type "brainfuck start" at the command line and get anything useful to happen.
The concept of "brainfuck" is one that is constructive, whereas "nosql" is deconstructive: one defines something from nothing, and the other defines something only by what it isn't. When you look at the ecosystem of NoSQL solutions, you don't really find much commonality... there are patterns, but they are largely defined by prototypical examples that are insanely disparate (BigTable, Dynamo, memcached). Your past experience working with HBase (other than in the general "problem solving skills transfer" way) doesn't help one later work with fundamentally different systems like Riak.
Your sarcasm thereby definitely hits the exact statement made, but seems to entirely miss the underlying point: you are correct that even for SQL you have to use a concrete implementation, not the abstract concept, but to an important extent which database you end up using doesn't really matter... they are all pretty much the same (and yes, this is coming from someone who in different contexts will implore people to not judge "SQL" poorly due to problems inherent in "MySQL"). That is just not true of "NoSQL": if you want to be a little more honest in the comparison, you could try something like "not-Java" (which one also imagines is difficult to use inside of a big-company matrix).
Sorry, I had to do that.