Interviews are supposed to give a reflection of a person, their thinking process or get an insider scoop. Nothing here.
EDIT: Sorry people, just saw that interview aimed to know the tools he used to get things done. So my bad!
Personally, however, I found that quite disappointing. :( Reading through the list of people and what they had to say I'm thinking, "man, I wonder if that was a random choice, or something that person spent a lot of time thinking about". Maybe I'm weird, but just knowing that someone who's work I admire has a Compaq Concerto isn't interesting if I don't understand the tradeoffs that went into its purchase.
Another complaint I have is that the site attempts what I believe to be a strong and artificial separation between hardware and software, and even requires a fixed ordering: hardware first, software second.
In my experience, software and hardware are really two different physical manifestations of the same underlying concepts (maybe I've spent way too much time on projects that involved writing software to accomplish the same goal as a previous generation's fixed function hardware), and end up having dependency relationships that criss-cross the supposed boundary.
As an example, many people interviewed on the site mentioned that they own a MacBook only because they were recently doing a lot of iPhone development and needed to use Apple's iOS SDK. However, it led to awkward phrasing to do that in the hardware section (before they had a chance to go more in depth into the software later), so the comment is stilted at the top and then short changed later (as it was already mentioned earlier).
It is also quite common, however, for people to first look at physical device properties like form factor, screen size, or input subsystem, leading them to make decisions that sound like "once I decided I had to have a netbook, I started evaluating whether to run Debian or Windows 7: either would be fine as I really only needed to run Chrome and a terminal".
I therefore look at this website as a giant list of missed opportunities to learn something really interesting and important about a number of really awesome people, and while I again agree: the site accomplished its stated goal, I think it is appropriate to judge a site on whether the underlying concept was appropriate in addition to whether they succeeded at their implementation.
The specific hardware and software I use to do my work is something I have spent a lot of explicit time thinking about, both alone and with the people I work with (we have spent so much time bickering over what the absolute best keyboard in the world is it would sicken many people), and I simply do not see a way to make these stories insightful or compelling with the constraint of explicitly discussing hardware first and software second. :(
A final comment: I did not say that they aren't doing anything right. I stated quite explicitly that I "personally" felt there were other interesting goals that were being left aside, and I will say that apparently some other people agree with me or we would not have seen the couple comments in this thread that led me to decide to post something to expand on the thought. Please do not assume that people expressing their personal opinions about something implies that that they believe that thing has no value to anyone.
The good ones include historical context and explanation of the setup decisions, this is just a list.
(Not saying that pg does it that way. For all I know, he might just use vi and mzscheme after all)