Ok, there are a few major things WRONG in this article.

First of. Cura. Cura is my project, I started development 2 years ago. I started in my free time, and after a few months of development Ultimaker hired me to continue development. As every user was switching towards it. It has been open source, free, and released for 2 years now. (It is a perfect success story for Open Source and I think Slashdot totally missed the opportunity here to properly see this)
Thanks to Ultimaker Cura has seen a HUGE development boost and really became awesome for Ultimaker AND RepRap users.

Next, WiFi is not in the machine out of the box. It is an add-on.

The UM2 is a professional looking version of our already very successful Ultimaker-Original kit. It has great printing quality for a nice price tag. Yes, you can do cheaper, but not if you want the same print quality. If you want cheaper then the UM2, buy the UM-Original kit.

You are so right on this one. Makerbot is all marketing all the way down. Their machine isn't special (hotend+extruder copied from the UP!, Z platform copied and slightly improved from Ultimaker). Their move away from OpenSource also hasn't done much good to the "hacker crowd".

But, reporting from Ultimaker here (you know, the 15 man company from the Netherlands that sells 3D printers). Dual extrusion is possible in a good way. We're working out the kinks and don't think it's ready to mass sell as Makerbot does it now. But we are getting towards Ultimaker quality.

Reporting from Ultimaker. You know, the real OpenSource 3D printer, that actually DOES do open-source software development.

Our printer hit the market 2 year ago. It's still top of the line. Sure they are cheaper options, and even a Chinese copy. You know what, they don't get the same quality and speed that we do.
The Cube is noisy, slow, prints in low res (as it's not allowed to compete with the expensive Dimension 150) getting one of these will more likely disappoint you in the capabilities of 3D printing then providing you with something useful.

Stratasys buying Makerbot is surely interesting. As they are paying about 20k for each printer sold so far. So they are not paying for the current market, they must be paying for the marketing, and thingiverse. People have been pulling models off thingiverse already because of this deal.

As on the Ultimaker open-source side. We just released our new version of our Open Source software solution Cura. Which is all AGPL, the GUI and the engine. Everything is usable on RepRap machines, and you can follow development as it happens. No secrets here.

You are so right on this one. It looks more like a small dog then a cat.

Sounds like a lead-acid battery. Which is heavy, but cheap compared to lighter alternatives.

PLA is not water soluble (That's PVA). And works outdoor fine, it just has a low glass-transition temperature where it won't work very well in high heat areas.

(counter-third) Cura doesn't gives a rat's ass about your surface normal. And the upcoming AMF standard support curved triangles to solve the millions of tiny faces problem.

I'm sad to hear that you own a Makerbot. I got an Ultimaker a year ago. And now I'm working at Ultimaker for a few months on software developement. We leave Ultimakers unattended a lot. I've added extra safety features in the RepRap firmware for this reason. We've done 100+ hour successful prints on our larger sized printers (up to 52cm). And we're working on improving the safety on our ready-build printers. But I have no fear in leaving our printers run unattended right now.

Makerbot does little innovation and mostly marketing. PLA printing? Guess who started that. The Makerbot extruder? copy of the UP! extruder. Gantry system? Ultimaker started with that. 3D scanner? Makerbot already did that in 2010 but they erased most traces of it.

As for the filament price. I know a raw roll of 0.75kg PLA costs us about 20 euros in bulk. The producer of the filament pays 4-5 euro's for the raw pallets, but has done a 20k investment for the extruder, and numerous hours tweaking the production process. So the producer needs to sell 1333 rolls before breaking even at the current price. The reseller also makes some profit for splitting the bulk into single rolls and shipping them. Add some tax and you are at the 30 euro price (which is 40 dollar, your factor is slightly off because I mixed euros with dollars)

In pure solid modeling FOSS we have FreeCAD and OpenSCAD.

Blender has some help tools for solid modeling (the "select none-manifold edges" [ctrl]+[shift]+[alt]+[m] really helps, as well as the remove duplicate vertexes with a range setting)

Board gamers love 3D printers for custom play pieces.
Lego builders like them for custom bits.
Robot builders like them for getting that missing bracket/piece now instead of in 2 weeks for 10x the money.
Architects like them for scale models.
Product developers like them for prototypes.
Artists like them to produce new and interesting art.

And I like them, because I'm printing an Desert Eagle for an arcade cabinet.

(Actually printing a working gun that does not have the risk to blow up in your face will be proven to be quite difficult)

You sir. Sorry for the word. Are an idiot. And have no idea what you are talking about.

A kg of filament is a LOT of filament. Plastic is light and objects are printed partially hollow. I do expect prices to drop a bit in a few years, as the raw plastics pellets costs about 4-5 euro per kg. (asking for 40kg per dollar is just sticking your head up your ass and asking for a pony)

Great for programmers, sucks for average humans. (And well known within the 3D printing communities. It's the 2nd most uploaded file on thingiverse, next to stl)

I made Marlin Arduino 1.xx compatible a year ago. And everything you say is RepRap related (who do a bad job at documentation), not 3D printing in general. You can buy an Ultimaker kit and be printing within a day. But you went the DIY route and are now surprised that you need to DIY stuff...

Stop looking at the bad reprap prints, and look at this:
http://davedurant.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/ultimaker-faq-but-what-about-the-quality-of-prints/

All done on stock 1200 euro Ultimakers.

A 30 day old character doesn't have the required skills for a Vindicator.