Well, I would say that is more an issue of Stephen Levy being a biased technology reporter, and the quality of Newsweek in general (which in my opinion, is rather low from an informational perspective)
As for ignoring XP64, is XP64 considered a consumer OS, or is it more along the lines of a server or specialized OS? That is, are there Dells and HP's being sold to general consumers with XP64 on it by default and without the customer making a choice? I would guess not, but I might be ignorant on that point.
As for Windows not having anything new, that is a relative complaint. Certainly XP does not anything as "new" as OS X later this week, which isn't even officially out yet, so...who is newer as of the last update on the part of each OS? A semantical difference, I agree.
XP64 will be a consumer OS. Server 2003 already has a 64 bit version.
It will be a couple years before consumers see a big difference in performance. Programming techniques need to be altered, drivers written. All this on top of the switch to dual core CPUs.