Given he's speaking to a (in his mind) specific type of game/gamer most of his points have some merit.
Of course the second you have everyone adhering to firm rules you lost creativity and risk stagnation until someone dares to break the rules (as you could argue Nintendo did with the Wii).
Or to put in another way...
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way - Juan Ramon Jiminez
As for tutorials I do think they should simply arise from gameplay if at all possible.
I remember the obstacle course in Half Life teaching people how to play an FPS (I still wish you actually could have entered the staff competition mentioned) while most recently Portal cunningly taught us how to play the game so when it really began in earnest we knew what we were doing.
Try to be reasonable... its easier than you think...
