I caught the play services as well but rather than try to take down the article for not being perfect I've been trying to think about what it's talking about.
I don't think there is anything mentioned in the article that is not realistic, including a 1 second boot time on a phone that you bring up. The only reason we can't get a phone with a static hardware configuration to boot in a second is because that's not what we've been optimizing phones for. LinuxBoot is a great example of how the time it takes to boot is purely about how much time we assign people to optimizing it not some laws of physics that require servers to take 7 minutes to boot.