Ah yes, this brings me back to the microcomputer engineering class I took before finishing my undergraduate degree. We had to design a fairly simple 16-bit processor, and I remember deciding to go with a microcoded approach - but you have to start somewhere, and our class started pretty much where this article does. It's remarkable how these very fundamental concepts can be used to create such complex, high-speed, and interactive systems.
I also think it's both scary and amazing to think how far we've come in the past 70-ish years of computing history - all stemming from these very concepts (boolean logic, binary math, and finite state machines).