When all you're doing is copying the physical device experience, it's the laziest UI design you can possibly make, completely ignoring the medium you're working with. Sure it works, just as well as the physical machines with a hundred buttons and knobs do, but it doesn't make use of all the possibilities a computer can offer. The best and the worst of the physical experience has been ported.
To me this is the same as emulating a rotary dial as a mobile phone's only means of dialing a number. It only sounds ridiculous because we all know the more efficient alternative. I think a lot of music software has yet to find the UI breakthrough it needs. Whenever that happens and a new standard of music software UI makes better use of the computer as medium, people will look back at UIs like reason's and find it very misguided.
That doesn't mean the answer to all UI issues is to go minimalistic like the article suggests, but I think real-life device mimicking is generally a sign of lack of UI/usability hard work. It's always the easier solution to copy the existing rather than think hard on a better solution nobody's done before.