I don't understand that article at all -- it talks about V2Pro and its hard PPC but, as the other commenter mentioned, it conveniently ignores V4 and V5 which both have flavors that include hard PPCs.

Anyways, my impression -- and that of the Xilinx and Avnet FAEs with whom I've spoken -- is that the academic people love the embedded processors because they can boot Linux on a thousand-dollar eval board, of which they only buy one. But for real products, the embedded-processor parts are too expensive and the performance (especially if you use Xilinx' cores) isn't anything spectacular.

Unless board space is the limiting factor, you're a lot better off buying a standalone PPC and mating it to the FPGA over the processor bus. Really, the various Freescale PPCs have much better DMA engines and DDR2 controllers and Gigabit Ethernet controllers and the two-chip solution ends up being a lot less expensive than a V4, or for G-d's sake a V5.

I couldn't agree more, we had an academic group doing an IP project for us at York university and they insisted on using the xilinx softcore procesor which is really just a glorified state machine, to implment their algorithm, and we said look why dont you implment your alogrithm directly in hardware?, and we got a thousand excuses as why they couldn't do that, so we ended up walking away from the project.
Unless you know that your system is completely set in stone and bullet proof SoC is very expensive and long winded.