What?
I fail to see what is "non-average" about wanting to restore a machine from a Time Machine backup after a hard drive failure. Time machine is the only backup solution an average user will ever use, and is supposed to be a backup solution, not a placebo. As indicated in the article, it doesn't actually work for the the most (or second most) common case.
Rob Pike is most decidedly average in this case, he is most interested in working on his projects, not understanding the trivialities of maintaining the Apple Macintosh. Just like most people who have work to do that doesn't really revolve around shuffling boot disks around.
The "experts" (that, those who read macrumors regularly), will, of course, have not trusted time machine and will have a carbon copy cloner backup they can clone onto the new drive. They're ok. Meanwhile, the "average" folk who trust that an Apple provided backup solution... I dunno, backs things up... will be screwed.
Is windows worse? Maybe, but you know what -- as shitty as their incremental backup to a series of .zip files is -- at least it takes a complete image of the boot drive by default as part of the backup.