Is a h.264 license more expensive than the extra bandwidth that would be necessary for Theora?
Frankly if Safari and IE were to suddenly support Theora (or Firefox and IE to suddently support h.264), this argument would be over. No one cares about the technical details. Any codec that works pervasively will win.
Firefox is another story; they aren't charging, and according to the article, would be responsible for the licensing costs for every one of their (hundreds of millions of?) users.