I'm hoping the good professor was simply misquoted, shouldn't that read "high waste-heat generation"?
And could they perhaps check that SRC isn't called SCR when quoting him? /pedant

You have to look past the numbers, it isn't a matter of being "dead", it's a matter of weighing the cost of supporting IE6 specific code against an increasingly small number of users.

Even though your stats indicate Opera and Safari are in the same percentile for your site, they'll render standards compliant content without HTML/CSS/JS specifically written for either one.

If any of my sites had less than 10% of IE6 traffic, I'd stop supporting it officially for them. In reality, most of our B2B sites have > 50% of users on IE6 -- we'll be stuck with it for some time. Hopefully Google's impetus to kill support for IE6 can help sway corporate decisions more than Microsoft's own declaration of obsolescence.