Hating funnels seems sort of weird to me. Especially in this case, where it's just a model of an idea. There is nothing inherently evil about the concept of a funnel. He even makes that point when he turns it upside down and claims it as genius. The act of the trying to force people through the funnel on your timeline instead of theirs is where the problem is. And that act is going to be a problem no matter how you are modeling the customer acquisition process.
I feel the same way. In fact the idea of "flipping" the funnel is not new. Seth Godin wrote an ebook on it: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/flipping_the... It's a lot easier for sales and marketing manager to think about conversion in terms of funnels, so a lot of analytics startups (kissmetrics, mixpanel) have it as a standard report. It seems that using a strong word like hate gets you attention; hence clicks.
