Well, I'm slightly disappointed he side-stepped the issue of an ABI as I think its probably the most unglamourous but most essential aspects of a platform. Its not a cool language feature, but for big software comprising lots of modules, it would make life much easier and I think C++ adoption more popular.
I work with C# as well, which has such a thing as an ABI, and using libraries is a real doddle - just drop the assembly dll in the bin directory, add a reference to it with a corresponding #import in the source files you want to use it... and you're done. C++ lacks this, though I would be fine having to include a header file too, its the ubiquity of dynamically loaded modules that could be written in any language (or more likely, they calling into my c++ library).
When you have several hundred modules in your program, you realise how nice it would be.
The issue of vendors is a non-issue I think. I recall building a program using Sun's compiler, then we upgraded and nothing would link - because Sun had changed their ABI between versions. I think Microsoft doesn't change it, but only because its stable, not for any other reason. Standardising wouldn't be much of an issue anyway - they'd probably have a flag that said "generate old or new" exports and leave it up to the user if they wanted the old, compatible ones (doubt it, most people recompile everything every time anyway due to the lack of an ABI!).
Meanwhile Microsoft comes up with their own versions (first COM, now WinRT) and they're inferior, being based on a funny sort of C for the first, and a funny sort of C# for the latter, leaving C++ binaries only practically accessible to other C++ programs.