Great article, Steve. And, yes, I agree... the basics will never go away and there will never be enough people that know them. Heh... as I've stated in the past, I know a whole lot of interviewees that claimed 10 years of experience and claimed to be SENIOR DBAs and SENIOR Developers and SENIOR Performance Tuners that were more ignorant than people that have read even something like "Learn SQL Server in 21 days".
I also appreciate the link you provided to MVDBA's article. That's an excellent article.