From what I can tell, there isn't much difference. My guess is the developer was making up for the lack of this functionality in Django 1.3 and didn't realize that 1.4 added it. Before 1.4, django pipeline was a good solution but was difficult to work with IMO. Glad to see this included in 1.4 for sure.
Great article, but I'm still not sold on using Vagrant. Is there a case where it can help if I'm not deploying one app per vm? I often host multiple apps on the same VM slice.