He's completely right. Hyperthreading is all about putting idle functional units to work when you can't extract instruction level parallelism from single threaded code. His claim is that Intel processors did better and thus only got a small relative boost from HT (IIRC it used to be 10%, maybe it's 20% now). If your processor does poorer at ILP extraction, you get relatively more out of HT.

This all agree with the benchmarks in which Intel still generally is ahead on single thread performance. For a more extreme case look to older POWER processors which were 4-way threaded, presumably because they were even worse on single threaded code.