Just to provide a counter-point, from a usability point of view I found that article terrible.
On the 1920 pixels wide screen at work, more than half the horizontal width became buttons (previous and next). As soon as the mouse pointer was outside the white background for the linked-to article, a click lead to navigating away from the article.
It took me at least two or three times of wondering where the fsck the article I was reading went, before I realized what was going on. Apparantly randomly clicking on what looks like (and ought to be) passive whitespace is a bad habit, on today's web.
Perhaps he worked on his site when he worked there? I don't know, whenever I see concept work like this I think that it is an impressive hobby, but often I feel that perhaps the efforts could've been spent elsewhere, at least for the reasons you specify. I mean it has great texture, but it works like crap on my Chrome here as well.
But that website is a work of art, although it does crawl in chrome on my current-gen mac mini.
If the guy doesn't like apple, I doubt he'd have much trouble finding work elsewhere.
EDIT: re-reading, I see that he has.