A lot of this article reads like "I'm used to A which means A is better than B". For example, his troubles with Xcode.
And in this context, I think that's fair enough. There are far more developers out there with more than a passing familiarity with Java & the Java toolchain, than there are for Objective-C/XCode.
By the sounds of it, it will be easier for those developers to develop for Android phones than the iPhone. Regardless of the relative technical merits of the platforms viewed in isolation, the ability to re-use your existing Java chops is going to be valuable.
(I speak as someone who has done equally small amounts of development in both environments - personally, I prefer Objective-C development)
As to memory management: given that Cocoa's retain/release/autorelease is not painful and my most agonizing debugging sessions with java all seem to revolve around theorizing WTF the garbage collector is doing and why... Well I think the productivity opinion is arguable as well.