I disagree on that front. Managing git repos is easier for me to do the way I always do it than with a slightly auto-magic system specific to those sort of git repos. Pathogen does a little, but does it flawlessly. Vundle does more, but the more it does is far less elegant.
I second this. I was hesitant at first but after trying it for a couple of minutes after getting the tricky config right (thanks to some helpful bloggers) I was very happy. And shuogo was very responsive to new issues, providing fixes within hours sometimes.
CommandT is nice for really large repos. At my last job, I worked on a very large rails codebase and CtrlP frequently took 5+ seconds to index, while CommandT was under one second.
I also worked with the author of CommandT at that job, which was nice.
Yes, you are missing something: it's a joke. People sometimes overstate things to achieve a comical effect. People use comical effects for a variety of purposes: to get other people to like them, to make themselves (and the things they make) look more approachable, to covertly criticise their own weaknesses and so on. You might not find it very funny but you know, it's still a joke. Obviously.
Not to mention it's not maximum awesome: CtrlP > Command-T and Vundle > Pathogen.