James Fallows, throw me a bone

The Times published a rant by James Fallows about question answering vs. keyword search. Google Q&A isn't yet at the level of question answering he describes ("tell me the per capita spending on education in California over the last 50 years"), but he also goes the entire column without mentioning Google Q&A.
For the record, Google Q&A has been live for over two months, and it's a lot more like question answering than vivisimo's result clustering...