Isn't that one of the design goals of the language? IMHO, the simplicity of Java and the small number of concepts is commendable, but I feel it could have provided identical features in a less verbose way. Take accessors. If Java had Python-like properties, the average size of a Java codebase would shrink by 50 % (though having public final fields everywhere as a convention would work equally well for non-API code - I probably changed a field getter into a computed property once, and it certainly wasn't in public-facing code). Same with qualified imports.
That said, if you have an IDE, you can fold a lot of cruft away. And the business logic part of the code is often very readable (as long as it has been written by decent programmers, obviously).
One thing that puzzled me about the article is the rant about HashMap not being special. There is no special syntax for writing maps, but there is no special syntax in Haskell either, and I haven't seen anybody up in arms about it. If you don't know when you should reach for HashMap, your lack of knowledge in basic data structures will not be fixed by having special syntax. The Java collections library (enhanced by Guava) is one of the best things about the standard library.