This article is worthless. My home experiment got me a great 2.4 GHZ AMD Athlon system with 512 RAM for ~$600 bucks. If I didn't go through a reseller, I could build it for half that. Plop Linux and a bunch of open source editing tools on there and you have a decent small time editing system...
On the other hand, if you add mor ram, a couple of extra processors and other niceties, it would be hard to have a high end system for a relatively low cost.
This example shows nothing new (neither does mine)... use the tools that you are comfortable with (price AND feature wise).