Having actually RTFA (I know, I know -- "what?!?"), I felt like it was a pretty fair assessment of the situation. Particularly, I felt like the emphasis was on the disingenuousness of Microsoft's claims that 32-bit systems could not support >4GB of memory (not on the possibilities of illegality). Further, your analogy is faulty in multiple ways, because Ford advertises the car as having a rev-limiter and speed-limiter, and advertises these things as being safety features. Microsoft, so far as I can tell, is not being upfront about its market segmentation, and is attempting to hide behind a wall of misinformation about 32-bit systems.
I've seen plenty of pointless Microsoft-bashing articles here at Slashdot. This doesn't seem like one of them. I'm not ashamed to say that I learned a lot from it, and that I wasn't previously aware of the details surrounding PAE (things I never would have discovered unless they were highlighted on a tech-news digest site like Slashdot, since I don't regularly peruse websites dealing with Windows-specific kernel research).