They write this as if that hasn't already happened. To put it bluntly, Pichai is no Nadella.
On the other hand, I truly believe Nadella was left with a golden basket. A lot of what Ballmer and Muglia left behind actually paved the path for what MSFT is today. Nadella has been excellent in executing the strategy, but in general I feel many people give him a lot more credit than he was responsible for.
Ballmer pushed hard for Xbox, was a big proponent of cloud and, most importantly, placed a huge emphasis on enterprise customers. A lot of the fruits of his labor were reaped under Satya's tenure.
More interestingly, it could be argued the biggest cloud evangelist in Microsoft at the time was neither Ballmer nor Satya, but rather Bob Muglia (the SVP of the servers and tools division). Muglia was notoriously hated by Ballmer and prevented his probable rise to CEO (he was fired by Ballmer and his position was filled by Satya).