You should look at their measurements and assumptions in context. As you can see from the URL, it was written in 2011 when the NVMe working group was first form

You should look at their measurements and assumptions in context. As you can see from the URL, it was written in 2011 when the NVMe working group was first formed. It was also written in the context of cluster-based applications in a data center and specifically mentions SSD and cost effectiveness. Storage cost effectiveness is critical at these scales because your data is growing by terabytes per day. You also mention blades, which goes into the next point of context which is that operations like Google and Facebook don't utilize blades like you might expect working at your average enterprise because they aren't leasing rack space or working with a limited amount of physical space. They don't need the same U to performance ratio so they can save money by using commodity hardware. Their applications also scale readily, so the loss of entire boxes is meaningless within a certain threshold.