About the rest, I wasn't praising Jobs as a great boss, just noting your equivalent isn't something to be proud of.
And I disagree that you will always need to compromise between good engineering and good UX, for example you can certainly have ASLR and DEP with the same UX OS X currently has, they don't add any burden on the user.
Of course sometimes you need to compromise, but it's not everytime.
Ballmer certainly looks like a great boss, having great care for good engineering practices such as yelling, throwing chairs at people and being generally obnoxious.
Also, user experience is a part of good engineering.
The key word here being "average". Many of my classmates weren't even able to do the things on the list, much less write a toy OS or language. So yes, for average people this list is a good stepping stone to become above average.
Successful nerds succeed, there are plenty of unsuccessful nerds. I, without a shred of evidence, would think there is a positive correlation between school geekiness and success, but all this "nerds will own the world" talk that is gaining traction lately is a bit foolish, in my opinion.
App Stores certainly won't stop piracy, as cleverly pointed out here and elsewhere. But that doesn't make the main point of the article invalid, which is that App Stores have changed and will still change the game even more.