You missed the point of those koans. Vim can use external tools like awk to edit CSV and markdown to process markdown. The author was discouraging use of vim itself for things like that.
TED can't show this because they're supported by advertisers, which means they'll never really be free to spread ideas if they go against the will of these companies: http://conferences.ted.com/TED2012/sponsors.php
It doesn't matter whether you agree with a company's technical choices, whether it's Paydirt, Microsoft, or anyone else. If you don't like their choices, you're free to not use their software.
Edit: And I missed the point of your comment.