So, seven lowercase letters. And this guy thinks it's "not that weak".
First off, you're right, that password could be better. But brute forcing a password (even with access to the hash) is harder than most people on slashdot think (I think).
7 lowercase letters is
26^7 = 8,031,810,176 possible password combinations
A few years back, we wrote a brute force password cracker as an exercise in programming on a cluster. It was nothing fancy - no rainbow tables or anything. Just generate all the passwords, generate all the hashes, compare the hashes and look for a match.
We cracked a 5 character password using a 94 character alphabet. That's
94^5 = 7,339,040,224 possible password combinations, so in the same order of difficulty but just a touch easier than the 7 character password.
Brute forcing that 5 character password (again, with access to the hash) took around 11 hours with the parallel program running on 95 cores.
Brute forcing that 5 character password with John the Ripper (much more specialized than our program) on a single core machine took 11 days.
So all of this is possible (assuming you have access to the hash), but it is not trivial & it is not the case that a 7 character password affords no protection. [OK, OK, I should also mention that cracking time varies wildly depending upon the hashing algorithm that is employed]
I'm inclined to agree with the editor, that hotmail is just more hackable than gmail. Especially considering the fact that the hotmail account was used as a SSO tool for skydrive, xbox & the metro store, I'm guessing that somewhere along the web of interconnected services there was a weak link in the chain & Microsoft dropped their pants.