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I a not disagreeing with the article and I would like to add: using Latex provides the same plain text advantages and after some learning curve you can do just about anything with it.
LaTeX is great when you need it (i.e. to write mathematics, draw clever diagrams, or need a Turing-complete programming language in your markup language), but when you don't, it's unnecessarily cumbersome, and Markdown is a lot better. Both have a settled spot in my toolbox, but it's not the same spot.

If you use Pandoc to generate e.g. HTML documents from your Markdown files, it's also worth remembering that TeX math mode is available in that. For example, [1] is an article on my website written in Markdown, but manages to include a decent amount of mathematics (replace .html with .txt for the source file).

[1] http://extralogical.net/articles/arithmetic-godel-system-t.h...

Sugared LaTeX would be great. Has anyone done this?
Well, Markdown to LaTeX is possible in pandoc. Otherwise, you could just write in org-mode (which supports many of the features of MultiMarkDown, if not all) and export it.
Pandoc is a great swiss army chainsaw for this sort of thing - I use it for Markdown into LaTeX (then PDF) and to ePub

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

tl;dr

Article is advocating the use of plain text in the form of Markdown & a solid text editor for distraction-free writing.

This is precisely why us Emacs users have been advocating org-mode for years. It can make generating tables, creating outlines, headers, emphasis, etc. all automatic and easy, (Most editors don't have support for markdown that makes this automatic.)

Best of all, org-mode syntax is just ASCII like Markdown and your grandmother could open it in notepad and understand perfectly what you're trying to convey.

Article about Org-mode that shows some common use-cases:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9116