I kinda understand IW's decision here - they are right with a lot of their responses in the GI article, as crappy as the journalism is from GI's side. Their response to having a dual option is also correct - you do break up the community with something like that, leaving hardcores to find servers and the more casual to do the matchmaking.
There's a lot of issues in terms of the current online experience with a lot of PC games, and IW is attempting to tackle that, which I applaud them for. With most games currently, you'll typically see douches/idiots that you'd expect more from 4chan, NeoGAF, Kotaku, GameFAQs, etc. at too high of a frequency, and it really downs the game experience of online gaming a lot of times. It's a lot of added stress for having to deal with bullshit attitudes when you just want to play the game.
However, matchmaking has its flaws, as exhibited by probably the most high profile of them all Warcraft 3. Assigning a player's skill to a number is a fundamentally flawed method of assessing someone's skill and matching people together, since it assumes all abilities to decide and act in a game are equal and constant factors. I think a lack of dedicated servers can work, but it all depends on the UI and how well does the game really cater to it. Matchmaking however is incredibly difficult to pull off well.