Yes he is. Granted I woudn't go quite so far as to say, "Benchmarking is pointless", but his point about the comparative usefulness of benchmarking versus profiling is right on the money.

I think the reason for this is not an inherent problem with benchmarking. The problem is that people (developers) tend to benchmark the wrong things and then they optimize the wrong things. Profiling on the other hand takes the entire system into account in its results. This is much more useful than optimizing based on a benchmark of a small part of a complex system.