It's nowhere near passive aggressive, just a statement of what Google does. Google does give a steady stream of traffic, but it's my goal to diversify traffic streams as much as possible at the same time - Google's becoming less important as a direct source of traffic from organic SERPs.

I'm not saying they don't add value, I'm saying that their entire business model is built on the back of the world's content.

I'm not sure why HN hates SEO so much, since Google doesn't...they hate SPAM, not SEO.