I didn't find it unfair at all. Comparing some general purpose approaches to a more specialzed one is not an apples and oranges comparison. It's the stuff that many orders of magnitude type optimizations are made of.

Also, keeping cache friendliness in mind in the design and choice of datastructures and algorithms is a good idea, which is the main point of his article.

What he says about vtables is fluffy though. The STL doesn't use polymorphism much.