A lot of folk disparage KR, but I've always enjoyed his stuff. If your quotation is from article I think it is, it was the reason I bought my D40.
Re holding the camera still, the stabilization in that Tamron 70-300 is so rock-steady you practically have to wrench it off-target.
Rockwell has a reputation for keeping the manufacturers "sweet" and never finding many flaws in the gear he reviews.
However I find that he speaks a lot of sense because, as we are discussing on this thread, most gear is bloody amazing, more amazing than the capabilities of the photographer in most cases.
I'm getting very tired of some of the other "famous" reviewers now, fawning over the latest and greatest cameras and making out that even cameras from the last 2 years are now redundant.
Yes the latest cameras as incredible pieces of technology, huge dynamic range, low noise at silly ISO values, and so on and so on. But the differences can only be seen at the very extremes, and under very close scrutiny.
All of this is fine for me because I still crave a good old Canon 5D Mk3 and they are getting cheaper on Ebay by the day. A bomb-proof tank of a camera with image quality good enough for thousands of Pros over the last 6 years or so.