Isn't he blurring the line between "commit" meaning creating a state you can roll back to (in all version control systems), and "commit" meaning pushing to the "official" code base in a non-distributed system? In other words, some issues with non-distributed systems that he highlights (having to keep an elite group deemed smart enough to integrate changes, for example) still exist when pushing to a consensus "official" instance of a distributed repo.
His language is pretty muddled in this talk. It's clear he didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about precise and unambiguous language for all of the things he was talking about. He also seems to conflate "branch" and "clone".
This muddled language later turned into a muddled UI that was supposed to get cleaned up, but never did.
I can't help but think that he was conveniently leaving out details that give the entire story - clearly he thinks the audience are unintelligent sheep, so surely they'll take him at his word, right?
Probably because those two actions are identical in CVS, SVN etc, which most people at the talk were familiar with, unlike the commit and push states in a DVCS (hg, git, bzr etc).
