If Google had come out and said "Nope, not going to do shared circles." then I might give the headline some credit, but basically saying "Hey they missed this feature that will be important, they will fail if they don't implement it." doesn't get the clicks.

I've been puzzling out how they have implemented this stuff and from what I have seen / poked at, I don't think it will be that big a deal to implement shared circles.

I agree. The article is clever, but it looks like a The Sun headline.