Agree with yours (and olefoo's) interpretation of #1; I singled it out because it raised a red flag for me as the kind of statement non-tech savvy people would make, thus calling into question the validity of this piece as a whole. (As much as I, as a software developer, would like to believe it!)
The second quote is pretty easy to support with sources. Google has three _official_ languages that can be deployed into production, and Python is one of them. See [this post from a Googler](http://everythingsysadmin.com/2011/01/python-is-better-than-...), for instance. I have no idea how hard a rule this is, but many a Googler has mentioned it. I think it's worthy of being called a 'fact', and thus completely valid in the article in question.