Re everything
Sir (Matt Asay),
the term "virtualized storage" actually means something else entirely than the used meaning of "storage for vitualized systems".
So again, I have to say that the IT Field of Storage is something not just about anybody can fiddle with. Taking your bootnote into account ("Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Strobe, a startup that offers an open source framework for building mobile apps") I would have to say that you either have no technical knowledge of storage or that your technical knowledge of storage applies to either the opensource software field or the mobile app field.
Having had a brief look on tintri's website, the problem with tintri's offering is that it is highly dedicated and nowhere near a brandnew idea. EMC's VMAX with Enginuity 58.75 (for example) can do exactly the same thing for many more application behaviours than tintri. tintri is thusly a niche player targetting the lower end of the storage market. Not really a market up-ender in the semantics that you proclaim.
Sir (Joshua Goodall),
I fully agree with your sentiment, and we both know that storage vendors actually try very hard to make storage virtualization a real reality (IBM's SVC, EMC's VPlex, HP's (rebranded) MPS200, Brocade's Application Module for which they sell a Data Mobility Blade to name just a few).
Having been around the block for nearly 12 years now, I must say that storage still is a huge barrier to virtualisation. Countless SMB's either use internal storage or a smallish mostly NAS-based diskcontainers as storage. True, most of those SMB's don't really have virtualization requirements, which is reflected in the 70% of enterprises that do not or did not yet virtualize their services.
There is also no offering available currently, that allows an SMB to outpace server-slice growth with storage growth: Hosting providers offer a direct link between amount of GB disk and amount of CPU&RAM.
Regards,
Guus