I'm pretty close to agreeing with you...

If we accept NULL as a "value" that has some kind of meaning, or that we can at least "deal with", and we assume that the ordering of the columns and rows aren't important, then we might accept that in some sense a SQL table is a faithful representation of a relation... or at least as close as we're going to get with our current products.

From that perspective (which is where I was coming from originally), the article's table is [probably] in 1NF. It's just that, as stated earlier, we're dealing with an overly broad domain for the Description column, namely, something like "the set of all values that are rendered for display as choices within a particular application's interface".

TroyK