Please don't assume I didn't read the article. I was referring to the ORIGINAL concept, hence "Light Peak". It's incredibly obnoxious to continually degrade people with that same line. Completely unnecessary.
The ORIGNAL concept had the same 10 Gb/s speeds that the copper connections are rated for per channel. The 100 Gb/s was farther along the roadmap. The switch to copper based connection was done to reduce cost and add the benefit of being able to also transport electrical current to peripherals, like USB.
(source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380890,00.asp
Thunderbolt also runs across a copper connection. As initially envisioned in Light Peak, the Thunderbolt technology was supposed to run across an optical connection, although Thunderbolt was shifted back to copper for reasons of cost, according to Jason Ziller, director of Thunderbolt planning and marketing.
)Although an all-optical version of Light Peak is still on the roadmap, the copper connection does have one advantage: Power can be passed along it, and Thunderbolt can provide up to 10 watts to an external drive to power it. The optical version of Light Peak will only be used if extra-long cables are needed, Ziller said.
So I don't know where this whole "Optical = 100 Gb/s" idea came from, but that's farther away on the Intel roadmap for the technology, it never was supposed to ship originally, even if we had gotten optical Light Peak right then and there in 2011.