Then again I haven't personally bricked a device in a long time.
These days its getting harder and harder to brick devices, as bootloaders are becoming more and more advanced and more separate from the cores of the devices themselves. Once upon a time a faulty network cable could render your router forever inoperable due to a dropped byte in a firmware flash.
Today, my galaxy S phone has had some truly awful things done to it, including corruption of the supposedly sacred NVRAM data, and the USB bootloader has always faithfully come up after the button combo, ready to accept a new flash. It must run on totally separate hardware from the phone proper.
Just because it's harder to brick things doesn't mean the meaning of the word has changed. People are right to think this is a mis-statement.