On another note; I think you (and many others) underestimate the amount of low level graphics API work going on, certainly in AAA games who are the ones who really want this type of thing.
Far from it. It's the level of abstraction provided.
Graphics accelerators were originally just that. Over time, they transitioned into heavy duty compute units, the fabled 1000-core CPUs. As such, they lost their specialization into just pushing pixels.
Does it still make sense for graphics API to be hiding how much memory you have available? For some, yes. But in a same way UE hides it. Meanwhile, a dedicated developer wanting to truly push would probably embrace the ability to query this memory.
It's a delicate balance between exposing too much or too little of underlying concepts. Java was mentioned and it demonstrates this well. In Java, you don't have a clue how much memory you have. As soon as you hit the limit, the answer is always the same - buy more memory. Which is crap, when dealing with upward unbounded algorithms that could use terrabytes if available. Sometimes you do want the basic layout of hardware.
DX has actually gone this route. From full-blown graphics API to basically a shader wrapper.
I also think that the yellow journalism style of this article makes it a fluff piece. Without understanding any kind of internals calling for death is void, as with all other similar declarations. My guess would be that MS realizes that developers, especially those that do any kind of advanced work prefer a simple, low level hardware abstraction, rather than an enterprise graphics framework. So instead of providing everything in one piece, the future might mean even further streamlining, perhaps exposing everything as compute shaders, on top of which the old graphics pipeline would be built - either by using some third-party engine or by using the API directly. DX11 is a large step in this direction already.
And there is still the extra stuff - is COM still needed at this level? Does it really make sense that very same API needs to cater to everything, from WPF and VisualStudio frontend and right down to real-time graphical extravaganza?
It's more about soundness of the API. Does presenting everything as OO model and abstracting the way things are now still make sense, or is there perhaps a different design better suited. I don't think anyone, at MS or elsewhere would, for a second consider exposing raw hardware again. Except perhaps on consoles, but DX isn't abandoning the desktop - it's simply too tied into it. Then again, mobile, consoles and all the dedicated hardware inside walled gardens does solve many hardware fragmentation problems. While at same time, MS has never in history tried to counter natural fragmentation. The company thrives on this anti-Apple concept and is probably one of few that has managed to be productive in such ecosystem. So as far as MS+DX go, death simply doesn't add up - different style of API however does.
The stuff about how things look or various broad performance discussions however don't matter.