Perhaps a lesson to learn here is consider who won. While AltaVista focused on physical details (number of servers, resource usage, etc...) they missed the boat on the bigger picture - how to significantly improve search engine results. Brin&Page did, filed a couple of patents, secured investment, registered google.com, scaled, etc and won.

Perhaps this is another example of what you measure is what you become. I realize it's just one email and we're missing all sorts of context, but to me, this email seems to boast at their technical prowess of being able to pull off the scaling aspects. Perhaps this email indicates measuring physical resources was a higher priority than DRASTICALLY improving search engine results.