I'm not surprised. As a coffee-drinking Italian, I personally think Nespresso is really good at what it does: it delivers, time after time, a great coffee with no effort whatsoever. You'll have to find a really good barista using really good equipment and really good coffee to beat it. It's the pinnacle of decades of evolutionary experiments from one of the richest companies on Earth, fine-tuning what is, like the article says, a relatively simple process; when you look at it that way, it's not surprising that it works so well.

This said, their business model is very much anti-consumer: they're doing with coffee what HP and Epson did with ink. For this reason alone, I never bought a Nespresso and I'll stick to brewing my own coffee. As the article says, it's not just about measuring, not even measuring quality: it's about the kind of world we want to build.