It showed that some existing code with a shim containing a reimplementation of a small subset of OpenGL 1.3 could be made to run acceptably fast on a rather beefy example of 2012's mobile hardware.

It certainly did not show that there was no need to exclude those calls back in 2003 when they were originally not included in OpenGL ES.

Wasn't there? There were a number of functions he didn't port. He ended up with a subset of OpenGL 1.3. Maybe that subset wasn't worth the effort?