No it was an obvious (and in my opinion childish) stab at Minix/Tanenbaum (although Tanenbaum sure is just as childish) given that Tanenbaum is still saying that Linux and monolithic kernels are bad, Stallman on the other hand openly admitted his mistake in going with the mach microkernel. The Linus/Tanenbaum adversity is as alive as ever judging by comments like this and the recent-ish interview with Tanenbaum : http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229/comments/1291183 where his comments on Linux and it's success is very telling.
It sounded to me more like a simple reference to re-enforce that this is not about theoretical stuff, it's about a piece of software actually being used all over the place.