The article is talking about things that are not simply evolutions of existing technologies, but outright reinventions that show promise.
Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware and potentially interface with tons of devices and protocols, so you would need to allow programmers to go to the hardware level and read and write bytes by hand.
Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X.
Historically, I think Unix was the first OS to run on multiple different kinds of hardware, as opposed to running on multiple variants of the same architecture.
Real operating systems