While I agree with that to a point, I'd like to point out that the post you're replying to also just describes "refactoring state away" (like what you alluded to in your original post.
So, I think that you're both not wrong: State tends to be one of the (if not the) fundamental problems in most of programming. Often, looking at things from another perspective is very helpful. And we should be uncovering new strategies to do that for all places where we haven't, including the GUI.
Of course, that also means that we arrive at the meta-problem of synchronizing the state backing various systems at one point. Which mostly encapsulates Karlton's "two hard things": Cache invalidation and naming things. :)
