So the argument is https has too much overhead and excludes those who cant use updated browsers? Unless I missed it, the article doesn't discuss mitm, nonrepudiation or censorship/privacy concerns.
If you want to update/browse with Windows 2000, then you should set up a local TLS terminating proxy for it, rather than asking the rest of the world to decrease their security for you.
It gives a few examples of use cases where protection against these are not necessary. This is one of my pet peeves too and I agree with the author. Though if you want google to list and rank you, you have to have it. (This might have changed. Google doesn't do anything for long.)
As a side effect of the push for https, local web log analysis is basically worthless nowadays. This might be why google pushed it so heavily.