Lastly, I really wish the author would give suggestions for what he considers to be a better approach to testing, beyond "integration testing sucks and is a scam".
He has more articles on better approaches than integration tests, but I haven't read them yet so I can't say if they answer your questions sufficiently: http://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/blog/categories/integrated-...
However, that doesn't mean that integration testing is useless. Writing a few tests to verify that mission-critical functions (like website registration) are working can save you when something goes wrong, and it's more efficient than doing manual regression testing every release.
Lastly, I really wish the author would give suggestions for what he considers to be a better approach to testing, beyond "integration testing sucks and is a scam".