I must not be reading it the same way you do. It sounds like they are just giving encouragement that once your learn the basics (with them) you will be able to go and do more advanced things.
Giving encouragement like that would be misleading if they didn't also provide the tools to do that. We don't need to speculate too much because we have already seen from them that they plan to have the ability to write smart contracts using the 21 software stack and it sounds like the 21inc chip is a pre-requisite to participate based on this sentence "But a 21 Bitcoin Computer is only a hard prerequisite for the subset of tutorials that utilize hardware or OS-level features for mining and micropayments.".
Given this, it seems that projects like ethereum may be unnecessary to fill existing gaps since offerings like 21 will be able to fill those gaps using the bitcoin blockchain. That's pretty exciting to me!