In this particular case, nobody's coddling him because he's a genius, but because it's his repository that he's talking about whether or not to accept pull requests for.
Simply put, he has a rigid standard for pull requests, and GitHub isn't capable of adhering to it, so he can't (without making an exception) accept pull requests using the tool.
The rest of his ranting is mostly subjective, but I do find it amusing that pull requests in the number 1 git hosting service don't meet the creator's muster, and I'd love to know the reasoning behind their implementation.
For what it's worth, I didn't know of the in-built git pull request and I'm an avid Github user (though not submitting Linux kernel patches,) so in the spirit of optimism, airing this rant was informative to at least me, and probably many others.