This part is totally misguided.

> What’s missing from MongoDB is a SQL-style join operation, which is the ability to write one query that mashes together the activity stream and all the users that the stream references. Because MongoDB doesn’t have this ability, you end up manually doing that mashup in your application code, instead.

Even with a normalized relational database one wouldn't make a single query to return rows from a join of tables T1, T2, T3, etc when there are repeating relations such as the users in the social graph. This might be done sometimes paying for the duplication to save a network round trip, that's all and no different.