Kay, I think he is just stating that the industry desire to cater to all things "i" plus the years of mental conditioning that you must check browser brand to guarantee functionality of "x" along with the assumption you can bully people into downloading flash (the last one I especially don't care for) just has created an environment where all of the practices above were acceptable (depending on where you are).  

I think the OP is just trying to get the point accross that it is a bad practice, even moreso in todays world.  It does seem however that before you make these changes, some of this stuff should be standardized (like the event handling which may be but I haven't done JS in web dev for quite some time) and worries me that he's refering to them as MS objects/events rather than events that everyon (except apple) is using.  Seems that would just create more desire for everyone to find an alternate way (since everyone seems to hate MS so they can feel like they are part of the hip crowd).  The implementation seems to make a lot of sense and be very straight forward though so I'm looking forward to playing around with touch soon.