I basically agree with the final conclusion, but I don't think the example given--deleting five lines of text--actually supports it at all. The author is claiming that vim's way of doing it is cryptic (normal 5dd), and then says this about emacs' way:

    Define a function for a ‘universal’ n-many operator
    ( Control-U ), pass that an iteration count integer,
    have that perform the pre-defined global
    kill-line-of-text operation ( Control-K ).

Vim's solution is conceptually the same: you're in normal mode because that's where you do text manipulation, prefixing commands with numbers is the standard way of repeating an action a fixed number of times, and dd is the pre-defined global delete-line-into-a-buffer operation.

They're both cryptic until you understand what's happening--the only real difference is that vim is less explicit, because this kind of action is exactly what vim is best at.

I suspect that there's a better example for demonstrating emacs' power, but I don't know emacs well enough to provide it. Vim is probably my favorite piece of software, but there are certainly things emacs does better.