In fact, if they are truly free to be creative, yet have some constraints in terms of time and money, its likely to work better.
Try reading your post with s/lifestyle business/startup/g;... it's the same point. More specific language isn't a bad thing.
(and I'm not the OP. ;) )
Let me suggest a viable alternative, that would actually solve your problem: be more selective about the kind of infosources you're letting yourself influenced by, OR be more cognant about the fact, that you're letting yourself influenced by writings of underpaid philosophy-grads. More generally: ask the question "how do I know what I think I know" a bit more often. Or just take the red pill, and dig into techcrunch archives, say, 3 years back, and compare with reality. All of these can work wonders for your perception.
In my opinion, "lifestyle business" implies that the business is done to generate cash in a regular manner with little input. The business itself doesn't matter so much in the end and the main goal is to sustain the revenues rather than necessarily expanding the business. This is exactly what "The 4-hour Work Week" is talking about. Real-estate investments can be like this as well.
On the other hand, you have bootstrapped businesses like 37signals, GitHub or plain web/design agencies which tend to be wrongly lumped into this category. If these were lifestyle businesses, then any store owner, plumber, contractor would have a lifestyle business as well.
On an unrelated note, it seems very premature to put Path.com in the same category as Twitter and Facebook.