That's an excellent paper; thanks for the pointer. I think it correctly notices that a lot of both sides have been talking past each other lately, because the old 50s/60s oppositions aren't quite there anymore. In some ways, Chomsky's critique is obsolete, but that's in part precisely because Chomskyian ideas have now been taken up in the statistical community, in ideas like grammar induction. ML is now willing to study grammar models higher up the Chomsky hierarchy than the simple Markov-chain models they investigated in the 50s, which does owe something to Chomsky's studies in formal grammar (like the existence of the Chomsky hierarchy), even if Chomsky himself has been slow to notice that they have indeed taken up some of his ideas.