I really liked "These systems end up being large hunks of monitoring, tests, and operational procedures with a teeny little distributed system strapped to the back."
Where is the flaw in the reasoning? Is it the dreaded Hadoop single points of failure? No, it is far more fundamental than that: the problem is the assumption that failures are independent. Surely no belief could possibly be more counter to our own experience or just common sense than believing that there is no correlation between failures of machines in a cluster.