I went to Georgia Tech, which is considered a difficult school (though I personally believe it is not as tough as Berkeley). The most difficult part was that you had exams and assignments in several subjects at once. Life would have been really easy if we had just one class per semester; most of the individual papers weren't extraordinarily difficult. A couple of days research sounds reasonable for about 50% of the assignments I wrote, but you'd be shocked to see the dip in quality if you can only find 2 hours to spend on it instead.
I think his point is that the "master of manipulation" at Berkeley was able to get satisfactory work from people who didn't even have a college degree only because they didn't have enough to simultaneously work on multiple assignments (and could therefore dedicate a lot of time to one assignment). So the difference between one of them and a good college student is just the throughput, rather than a fundamental difference in the ability to complete the assignment in the first place.
However, I don't agree with that comparison in one respect - you typically have plenty of flexibility in college with regards to when you actually complete the assignment. You get it weeks in advance, allowing you to plan things out meticulously, if you're that sort of person.
And this is true - I remember people from college like this. They didn't have the raw brainpower or intelligence that you might expect of a typical high achieving student, but they made up for it with superior time management skills and perennial self discipline.
