This is very Jobsian. He knows what's right, and he's dressing down people who also knew what was right but did the wrong thing anyway. People act as if Jobs was a tyrant badmouthing random innocent people. He wasn't. He was actually pretty genial most of the time. What would set him off was not when someone made an error, but when someone did the wrong thing and they knew it was wrong at the time, but did it anyway.
Jobs was the keeper of the flame of "do the right thing" (my phrase for it) which always involved the right thing for the customer (which is why Apple doesn't follow trends, and rather than make netbooks made the iPad, a superior customer experience.)
Linus is doing the same thing here. For Torvalds the customer is a different customer, both linux users but a lot of developers and the open source community at large. But he's keeping the flame as he sees it, and history indicates he's pretty accurate.
As to another commentators wondering if this would happened if the submitter was female, it really shouldn't matter. I'd like to think that Linus reacted to the error, not the person. It's true that taking it down a notch or two and being more diplomatic is appropriate, almost all the time. It's clear that Torvalds is this way almost all the time, which is why he has such a lovable teddy-bear image, for the most part. The power of blowing up on someone is not when you're doing it, but in the knowledge that there is shit up with you will not put. That's the power.
Also, there's nothing really that gender specific in what he said. Both men and women could engage in hypothetical "dick sucking contests".
Frankly, the average female engineer I've known is tougher than the average male engineer I've known (who tend to be a bit on the wimpy side, while the women tend to be a bit less wimpy than average for people.) But that's just my experience, and consequently anecdotal. The point being that I don't really believe that female engineers are desperate for people to protect them, and that most of the "software development is So Sexist!" people are non-engineers looking for an excuse to be outraged. Some evidence: all the hate towards "brogrammer" stuff, which it is painfully obvious to everyone inside the industry is an inside joke lampooning male programmers by contrasting those pasty nerds with the tanned jock stereotype that beat them up in high school. To act like "brogrammers" are perpetuating a male sexist culture is to, in the most profound way possible, not get the joke!
However, there is sexism... and the reaction from the sexists would be much different if he had been addressing a female. But that's not sexism on Linus's part- in this hypothetical he was saying the same thing in both cases. But if he'd said it to a female, the knee jerk sexists who want to see sexism everywhere (except in themselves) would have reacted quite differently.