Nice research. You are correct that Moore’s Law states nothing about “speed” or “cost” of the items covered by Moore’s Law. Improvements in speed and reduction in costs are merely side-effects of the increasing density of the transistors.

The second article found through a Google search, also written by the book author, states the following:
“Moore’s law has held true over the three decades since it was first published, and Moore’s law has been extended to cover RAM and disk storage costs as well,” which is what the second sentence in the book quote is refuting. The second sentence of the book quote may be the only accurate sentence from the quote.

For the third sentence, take a look at the following:
http://books.google.com/books?id=E1p2FDL7P5QC&pg=PA428 (Upgrading and Repairing PCs By Scott Mueller – I have two older copies of this book on my bookself)
http://www.computermemoryupgrade.net/types-of-computer-memory-common-uses.html
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=DSN_81D59F89C70D4CA388E7374AAE294BD0&isLegacy=true

If the third statement is correct, then bubble memory (http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-bubble-memory/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory ) is just as good as the memory used in SSD drives.

Wikipedia states Moore’s Law as the following:

“The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.”

While this may roughly equate to “speed” the author should have been more specific.

I did not spend a lot of time with the part of the quote on RAM. I find it hard to believe RAM hasn’t improved in the last three decades. A brief read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_bandwidth and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random_access_memory would imply that RAM has made significant improvements as we’ve more recently from DDR to DDR2 and now DDR3.