According to the article, Ozzie objects to the way that Wave has sprung almost-fully-formed from Google rather than evolving slowly by the codification of observations about successful implementations.

The headline is a claim about what Wave is and not about how it came to be.

I'm not an insider and I probably haven't studied Wave as closely as Ozzie['s staff], but it appears to be consistent with web architecture: the interactions are basically stateless client-server, there is a uniform interface for operational transformations, it accommodates caching, and it imposes enough structure to support layering.