That's true, but on the other hand, as TFA points out, IE8 is the latest that a WinXP user can ever get from Microsoft, which is two-years old and practically outdated now. Linking IE6 users to IE8 is progress, sure, but useless given that they could be running Chrome or Firefox, which are actually modern browsers.
Yea, I think the real problem here is that IE9 is not available for XP, which is the newest version of Windows shipping with IE6, so they are stuck upgrading them to IE8.
Are you trying to say you think it's more effective to encourage users to buy Windows 7 (and most likely a new computer to support it) than to encourage them to install Firefox or Chrome for free?