Yeah, use of SSE registers does not imply SIMD, since x87 is gone in x86-64, so even scalar FP has to use SSE registers. The asm snippets for v::operator*() in the "Optimization level 1" section use scalar SSE arithmetic only (mulss). (There's some use of movaps to move data around, but it's a stretch to call that SIMD.)

I think the "leverage" sentence you quoted and the "with SIMD taken care of" one shortly after are maybe a bit misleading, since the asm snippets there don't really demonstrate SIMD.