People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote virtual machines.

We could argue about the definition of novelty all day and in the end I think it's simply a judgement call what one deems as exciting or worth talking about. If you're looking for something so profoundly different along the lines of Einstein and Heisenberg in physics, I agree with him through and through, nothing in systems will probably happen like that given the current funding paradigms (I can't actually think of anything like that in the history of computer science -- you can for example be as reductionist as you want if you want to take Pike's side of the argument: "oh, it's all just a collection of logic gates"...).