If it was just about turning off a WP feature (revisions), I would agree with you... but the author also writes:
What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.
Which is a more serious allegation, and trademark law would prevent them from calling it WordPress if they modified the software. It's pretty common in the open source community to insist forks use another name to prevent confusion.
You called out the most absurd passage in the post. My web-focused company uses WP Engine and I administrate it and let me tell you, it's WordPress. Completely WordPress. So some defaults are changed? Every other provider I've used does something similar. Matt hasn't mentioned the other excellent default WP Engine choices, if he wants more to complain about. Random PHP calls disabled by default. Must-use security drop-in plug-ins. High-risk and processor-intensive plug-ins disallowed. Regular plug-in vulnerability reports. It's an administrative layer of choices I appreciate as a web admin because I am just one guy. Also, I don't use revisions and neither should you if you have a large site. They balloon a database AND YOU SHOULD BE COMPOSING OFFLINE FIRST, anyway. Maybe I'm dating myself as a 35-year+ internet user but composing in a browser's text field is considered harmful. If you compose locally, you always have a backup and don't need revisions.
