I tend to think that Easter Eggs are a sign of creativity in and of themselves. In one of my unreleased desktop applications, we poured way more time into an Easter egg than we should have (and uncovered a very interesting way to DOS a mac). It's a fun creative outlet.
He meant that people put easter eggs into applications because they hated the corporate drone work and used the eggs as a form of rebellion. Web 2.0 was suppose to free us all from that sort of drudgery.
Interesting point. A lot of quirky creativity does get to show itself these days without needing to use easter eggs. For example in blog posts, cute little "About" pages, fun features like, etc.