I'm not impressed by this example. You could use the same words to describe nginx to some degree. "Do something that hasn't been done before" isn't a crazy amount of hype, in my opinion.
Event loops and asynchronous reactor patterns have been around since what, the late 70s? Node "callback soup" is isomorphic to the structured programming models of dataflows and transactional architectures. Event-reactor systems with asynchronous libraries have been present in almost every language I've ever encountered--hell, even Modula-2, a fucking ancient Pascal derivative, had coroutines which supported exactly this kind of interleaved or reacted control flow.
You could have used any other language, for literally decades prior to Node's existence, to build the same things. Even if you didn't want to build a totally evented system, judicious use of select/epoll allows you to reap the benefits of asynchronous I/O without locking your whole application into the event loop.
Node.js programmers are building concurrent applications on a platform without coroutines, without fork/join, without threads, indeed without any parallelism, without scheduler priorities, hell without integers--and claiming it's a new paradigm in computing.
