That's exactly backwards - the MapReduce paper was intentionally released as vaporware to make the rest of the industry spin its gears trying to replicate an imaginary result. And that's why we have Hadoop.
You realize you're arguing with an ex-Googler who has worked on production MapReduces that were first written around 2005 and has read the initial MapReduce commit?
I thought the MR paper described an actual working implementation. It had performance test results, descriptions of issues they encountered and solved, and some sample source code of how MR is used. It seems like a lot of effort was put in for it to be a hoax.