I agree. When I first read the title, "Serious" jumped out at me (possibly with the assistance of being the first word), and luckily for me I actually RTFA'd. Speaking for myself and more than likely any one who's done any web programming, a minor mistake of data passing being in the incorrect format for the Google APIs to digest is much much less than a "serious" design failure. In fact, its not a design failure at all. Its a code error, and luckily (or possibly unluckily) for the guys at USAspending.gov, Google's APIs don't just segfault out and crash the page, instead they try to parse it in a "is this what you wanted?" sort of way.
TL:DR - its not serious, its not a design failure, its a coding bug, and as TFA says its a 2-3 line fix. Not newsworthy if you ask me.
Silly people. Its obviously the Magic School Bus!
Well XP isn't going to be sold forever, and as it is now you need to pay a premium to get the Vista Business edition with the XP downgrade, so this article is actually quite good in promoting the confidence of consumers to buy Windows 7 for their netbook instead of looking for some hacked method to get XP on their shiny new netbook in the upcoming year.
TL;DR: When XP is no longer available to buy, I won't worry about putting Windows 7 on the netbook.
God doesn't play dice. -- Albert Einstein