Specs are always discussed every generation.
If MS wants to show where Xbox One's tech has advantages over PS4, then they should talk about them, rather than just banging on about transistor counts and "The Cloud".
Xbox One is certainly a more customised hardware design than PS4 though, between the ESRAM, DMEs, SHAPE, etc. It's more engineered, I'll give him that. But none of that matters if PS4 ultimately delivers better performance.
EDIT: All that aside, nobody can argue against his point that the actual games are more important than the specs. It's the reason PS2 was so successful. But then this isn't like the PS2 era either, where there were literally hundreds of third party exclusives.