It would be interesting to see Shuttleworth clarify, or retract his statements if incorrect, but I won't hold my breath. I imagine he'll quietly ignore it rather than address it. Lennart is already a whipping-boy[1] of the open source community, so it's not like people won't jump to assume what Mark says is true, regardless of the actual veracity.

[1]: He developed PulseAudio. He gets a lot of flak for that, for various reasons, but I think most of it is that any new system will have a period of instability based on the technology, implementation, and use. It's used in all the major distros now, AFAIK.