Thompson's piece is relatively sub-par compared to the typical high-quality pieces he puts out. The first part is solid, and he's one of the few people around that can provide a succinct, well-framed story around both SAP and Qualtrics. However, his evaluation of the acquisition is weak.
As you noted, there is a problem with the potential uselessness in interpreting customer intent from data in the current environment. An even bigger issue is the justification of purchasing a survey-based set of assets (Qualtrics) to increase SAP's capabilities in providing worthwhile interpretation of customer intent. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the Qualtrics set of product lines - at the end of the day - are still just surveys. You can dress surveys up with toolkits, dashboards, etc. but they're still surveys.
News of the acquisition reminded me of a GSB talk Bezos gave back in 2005 (I believe), which you can find on YouTube. He showed a room full of MBA students how Amazon had been using A/B testing of the site to drive interpretation of customer intent (among other things). Fast forward ~15 years and it seems like you'd be hard pressed to make a case for the lasting value of driving insights about brand/intent/loyalty/employee experience/etc. through the use of surveys. Lasting, actionable insights with value are found in the 'wild' now, where specific access to real-time customer behavior is had.
SAP could do a major reconfiguration of the human and technology assets at Qualtrics in a way that moves beyond the glorified survey method, but simply tacking on Qualtrics as-is doesn't seem forward-thinking in the least (not that SAP won't reconfigure Qualtrics in some way(s)).
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Someone might counter, "The synergy here is an offering that provides the ability to better triangulate intent/etc. by using tracking data + surveys + whatever else." My claim is that even under a triangulation strategy surveys are not forward-thinking.