Yeah, and who needs USB on a MacBook?

Seriously though, why would you assume this? The article doesn't state it - it gives examples of both devices being damaged in different ways, but cites only Dell as actually designing their hardware to tolerate bad cabling.

Perhaps Apple has built in some mechanism to protect the rest of the circuitry from a USB failure, but without further information it's more reasonable to assume that the MacBook owner just got (comparatively) lucky here.

Years ago, I shorted out a USB port on a desktop PC, with the same results - system booted and worked just fine, except the USB port was dead. Upon opening the box, I found a popped cap and some scorching on the motherboard; I'd be... reluctant to call this a well-designed failure mode.