SysAdmins care primarily about infrastructure; webapp programmers, well, you have a point. I mean, the top two stories of this moment are clearly infrastructure. But they care about other things, too. SysAdmins exist so that developers don't need to focus on infrastructure.
I include things like programming languages and libraries as infrastructure too.
Any webapp programmer worth knowing cares a lot about infrastructure. We might not be in charge of day-to-day operations, but we know it deeply shapes the end-user experience, and end-user experience is our whole raison d'être, whether that end-user is another programmer, a paid client, or somebody else.
sure, you care about it, but it's not what you do. Just like as a Unix SysAdmin, I care very deeply about power. Without good power, nothing I can do means jack. However, I know less about it than an electrician would, and (going back to Zed's comment) I wouldn't be able to name the people/companies who are famous for coming up with the high power switching technology required to keep my data center on-line.
It seems strange to me that, as he says: "when I would try to get work, it was impossible for me to explain the magnitude of Mongrel’s impact". Who was he talking to in these companies? My point is that MBA's don't care about Mongrel. HR drones don't care about Mongrel. If that's who he wants to target, stop building the next mail server and start building to next twitter -- it's probably less technically interesting but you'll be more popular.