From the original quote [1], what Apple does is "design" while what Google does is "web services". Design is more fragmented than web services and thus easier to break into. If Google + design -> Cupertino while Apple has only to master "web services" the war has already been won. Given how premature that seems, I'd say the core competences identified and thus the analogy as a whole appear to be stacked.
If design is so much easier, then why have all hardware manufacturers failed so miserably to match Apple over the past two decades?
Anything from phones, mp3 players, monitors, tablets, laptops etcetera, they all look cheap, plastic and designed without love and attention to detail. And yes, that includes Google's Nexus range, which aren't ugly but won't win any awards either. It should be possible, look at B&O or Loewe in TV and audio for instance, albeit that they sell at a premium way higher then Apple's. And by the look of it, it's not others they haven't been trying to imitate Apple (hence the lawsuits).
As far as I can tell, getting design right is very, very hard, and takes a broad commitment to excellence most companies are lacking.
And if one company has very conspicuously ignored design and the basic notion of delighting their users with products that aren't just functionally great but make people fall in love with them, it has been Google.
The design of the latest Chromebook is a huge leap, surpassing manufacturers that have attempted to match Apple for years, and comes completely out of left field from a company has so far shown little sign if even having any feeling for design.
It's also a pretty blatant copy of the Macbook. Given the history you outline (which I agree with) I think the huge leap for the pixel came from Apple. Just like the huge leap from a blackberry clone to an iPhone clone that android took over the course of 2007-2008.
Your link to patrik gibson's twitter shows how silly the original hypothesis is.
For instance, Apple's stores are still powered by WebObjects because WebObject is still one of the best web frameworks in the world.
Do people say that Amazon is "bad at the web" because obidos and gurupa were designed in the 1990s? They're worse than WebObjects by a wide margin. How about all the companies whose web services are from the 1990s?
Including google!
The rest of his examples are cheap shots or simply based on ignorance.
For instance, Game Center having trouble under heavy load is an exceptional event not a daily occurence, and lets not forget the weeks of cummulative time that google has had gmail down because of issues over the years, and all the mail people have lost and the fact that google will just blackhole people's accounts for no reasons and then when it happens you have no way to get your data back.
The rest of it is misunderstanding or misrepresentation.
In other words, this is just more propaganda in the endless google good, apple bad, ideological war that was started to try and cover the fact that android is a blatant ripoff of iOS.
[1] http://patrickbgibson.com/post/36041799210/apple-and-twitter