Yeah, I think we agree on the excellent typist point. It needs to be fast enough, but I suspect what happens is that pretty much everybody using a computer sufficiently to become a great developer reaches "fast enough" naturally through implicit practice.
Note Atwood claims you must be an excellent typist, training yourself to become one. I find this fetishization of a mechanical skill bizarre. I'm not advocating clumsily struggling with the keyboard like an elderly person, but past the point of "I'm a decent typist", I find that's enough.
I find there's no correlation between the problem-solving ability needed to be a great software developer and being a fast typist of the sort Atwood et al advocate.
I file this under "weird things some programmers believe without evidence" ;)