This is a bit one sided and biased...
Okay, there are a few statements made here that are questionable...
1) IBM originally brought out Visual Age for Java to combat JBuilder, and when it was rewritten in Java it became Eclipse. The IBM Java and WebSphere products were the real fight for Java against Sun, and the GUI was not a particularly important part of the battle. NetBeans wasn't originally Sun and Oracle actually badged JBuilder and rewrote it into JDeveloper. It was at that point that the Swing decision was made by Oracle. Oracle and IBM have both been active members of all the community processes inside and outside of JCP, including collaborating on the SCA/SDO standards that are so important for ESBs. BEA were just moving away from WebLogic Workshop to Eclipse when Oracle bought them, and that is the heritage of the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. I would expect Oracle to keep around JDeveloper because of its investment in ADF and JDeveloper, and Eclipse because of the community involvement. If they also do NetBeans then that is fine, but they need to keep both the Oracle and BEA customers happy - who were a bigger user base than Sun - and poach from IBM.
2) When Eclipse was written by the Object Technology Group inside IBM, including people like Erich Gamma, etc the aim was to make it faster and less resource hungry than Swing by using what is native to the platform. SWT is portable across anything that makes sense, including Motif, OS X, Windows, Linux. Nothing about it is tied to Windows. It looks like some Windows development not because of Windows, but because Windows, Mac OS and OSF Motif were designed to be similar in functionality to aid portability.
3) Its a case of horses for courses. I liked NetBeans, but in the end I moved between Eclipse and JDeveloper now depending on what I am doing. I code plugins for Eclipse, but not for JDeveloper as it tends to appeal to a different segment of developer. However, both tools are now very alike in usage due to the Oracle involvement in the Eclipse community.
So, I think this misses the point a bit when it talks about the SWT and Swing battle being important for Java. Oracle have bigger fish to fry in replacing the Sun Glassfish technology with Oracle WebLogic Server, and some of the JVM technology with that from JRockit.