Yes, sort of - I don't think he has the evidence to claim that a competent CPU engineer would have done things in a certain way, because all the really theoretically good CPUs (and I count Transmeta among them!) seem to have not succeeded in the market nearly as well as the messy, awful ones, and a CPU that no longer exists doesn't actually count for anything. A competent CPU engineer is balancing lots of tradeoffs. It might be the case that he's right, but in the absence of evidence I weakly believe he's not, and I strongly believe that he's not in possession of strong enough evidence.