I think the reason they don't say Namecoin explicitly is because at the end of the day, it doesn't particularly matter which *coin's blockchain gets used. At this point in the course of distributed system design, a "blockchain" can be thought of as a building-block for a system, and the matter of which particular blockchain gets used is an implementation detail.
>I think the reason they don't say Namecoin explicitly is because at the end of the day, it doesn't particularly matter which *coin's blockchain gets used.
I disagree. It matters a lot how much hashpower a given Blockchain has, else it can be easily destroyed (through forking) and/or interfered with (50% attacks). So Bitcoin has by far the most secure blockchain.
> it doesn't particularly matter which 'coin's blockchain gets used.
Well, except that it does, because depending on the blockchain used, you are dealing with different consensus protocols, and most importantly, different people. Namecoin is a worthy project, has been doing its noble thing for quite some time, and deserves at least a mention if this project is going to be working off of the sweat its core devs have put into it (and continue to do so).
