You are misunderstanding his point. Lisp used to be awesome because it implemented feature X. That is, show people feature X in Lisp, and they would be impressed because nothing else did X.
Now, everything does X. Showing someone Lisp doing X will get the response of 'So what?'. Therefore, Lisp is no longer awesome because of feature X.
Which is different (entirely) from what the article was saying. It listed off several things which current languages do.
What (someone) up the chain was saying was exactly that. Lisp is interesting because of those things that it alone does. Not because it is capable of things that other languages do.
Why should I do that? I'm a human. I find things I see awesome. I find all large 'falls' awesome. If the thing wasn't there a million years ago, who cares? I wasn't there also. But I'm here and some thing in the world can be observed by me as awesome. There are things that I might not find awesome after some years and there are other things that I find awesome for many years. Even if it is superseded by some newer stuff. The original iPod (I have one) is still awesome. It is a design classic. Timeless.
