I thought it was great. Maybe I haven't heard of these tools before. Reading about them doesn't mean I know how to use them or have a thorough understanding of security, but it's a good place to start googling and learn more.
nmap is a fairly common used tool for more than testing. So is dig netstat sockstat nc tcpdump qmail djbdns pf s(sh|cp) traceroute also read your security and tuning man pages as a great place to start.
Like, you're just not reading the article. You're just not. The fact that the OP mentions "getting physical" is an obvious counterexample to your criticism and reduction of "it's a list of "hacking tools"'. Can you see the narrative (the forest)?
No one calls Linux "a tool" in the sense you're talking about. The OP is saying, with that subheading, "If you're just some Windows [power?] user, you've got to radically change that" — or even further, "If you don't know that OS X is *nix, to say the least, you've got to radically change that".
I mean, it's The Guardian for Chrissake. What do you expect, a list of dotfiles with rich comments?