To be honest, I'm a little nervous about the fluff, too, but I do sincerely believe we're doing something different with 10x.
First and foremost, our clients are the developers. (Admittedly, this nomenclature gets a little confusing sometimes, but it's important for us to constantly remind ourselves that we work for you.)
Rather than thinking of it as a consulting agency, we see our job as making freelancing suck less. In the process, we're building a network of freelancers who share best practices. They even share customers... our customer development has revealed that the #1 complaint from freelancers is that it's feast-or-famine. Since each person in the 10x network brings in his/her own dealflow, one person's feast can ease another's famine. Imagine a P2P network for gigs.
Additionally, the article only briefly touched on the lifestyle design aspect, but that's really important to us. Just like managers in the music or movie industry, we're entering a long-term relationship with our clients, and strive to understand their goals and help them achieve them. For some people, that means we save them cycles that they can put towards their startups. For others, we enable them to travel more. (I started out as a client before we founded 10x, and I spent my time on music, e.g. recording albums, touring, learning the cello.)
Also, my cofounders come straight from the entertainment world. They managed John Mayer from being an unknown singer/songwriter to playing sold-out stadium shows. They bring a really unique outside perspective to our industry.
And finally, as the article mentioned, our cut is only 15%. My understanding is that consulting agencies often take 50%+.