You have to read the original article very closely or you'll miss their point: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards.

So what else is new? Things interesting to database researchers often take two decades to become mainstream.

To be interesting to a database researcher you need to think way beyond MapReduce. Stuff like distributing queries over 10^12 RFID sensor nodes each storing different data in a different way, optimizing in real time and adapting to arbitrary breakdowns in the communications network.