1. The original piece rails against aggregators...and the only reason I found it and read it was because it was featured on Techmeme. I don't have time to read the 10-15 techblogs that are cranking out 20 articles a day...but Techmeme does and I'm thankful for that.
2. I thought about leaving a comment on the original story, but what's the point? I don't know anyone in that "neighborhood." It's not a community I hang out in. I'm much more likely to comment here or even on Twitter where folks will see what I say. Score another for the "aggregators" (it's fair to count Twitter as an aggregator in this discussion because of the broadness of the Paid Content article).
3. There is a fallacy of the link economy, but the PC writer didn't pick up on it. Jeff Jarvis and all the link economy people are right that it's more efficient to link out, however it doesn't make more business sense to do so in most cases because of search. If you create an "article" that's just a headline, 50 words, and a link, Google News won't index it. So it actually makes more sense to republish the same AP article everyone else does, basically pitting your Google mojo against that of the other papers in the AP. The other option is to write some original commentary around the link that will get you up over the length requirements or to pull a Gawker/HuffPo and just lift enough text to make your article long enough for search and detailed enough to keep readers from clicking through.
Simply linking to coverage you can't match in house may save you money, but you won't make any off of it. You're truly better off $$$-wise to just run the AP stories or copy-pasting your competitors stuff.