Actually, the post said "without a lot of change", not straight ports. Ie, this is more about ports like claws, gpodder or xournal rather than running an arm-compiled openoffice on the tablet (although as we know that is also possible). And indeed that is one of the core strengths of the platform IMHO, and at least part of the reason Nokia is pushing home-grown projects upstream, tracks other upstream projects more closely and so on.

This goes much deeper than GUI apps btw. Systems today are so complex that the "standing on the shoulders of giants" approach is really the only sensible way to build them if you want to get anywhere before you're obsolete, and why proprietary alternatives will ultimately fail. Just a trivial example: how many mainstream non-POSIX OSs are still around today, and is their popularity growing or declining?