Absolutely. In light of your comment, perhaps I am misunderstanding what the original article means by a generic learning algorithm? The points you make are we

Absolutely. In light of your comment, perhaps I am misunderstanding what the original article means by a generic learning algorithm? The points you make are well understood in academics. There are probably hundreds of papers on feature selection and domain specific modelling in bioinformatics, for example. In terms of boxed learning algorithms, I would assume that such a thing would provide for a way to supply models and inputs in a variety of formats. The latter allowing for users to do their own domain specific feature selection or other types of data reduction before applying a particular learning algorithm. In that sense, I could see things like Google's prediction API being useful in principle, even though it won't eliminate the large domain specific portion of the work.