I don't know about that, Google has a defined set of rules, if you build your site to take advantage of that defined set of rules then good for you. It is no different than apples UI guidelines. When you start to device the system to get ranking that you do not deserve then it becomes a grey area but just optimizing your site and taking advantage of available resources to promote your site is indeed squarely in the realm of white-hat.
Going back to the UI analogy, it is one thing to provide an optimized UI that has been A/B tested to sell anti-virus software. It is another thing entirely to provide a UI pop-up that says your computer is infected when it is not in the hopes of scarring someone into buying anti-virus software. Optimizing to sell is white-hat. Deceiving to sell is not.
But when you own a website that does "deserve" to rank and Google's algorithm allows for spammers to get to the top, then you have no recourse but to fight fire with fire.
If I had a great site about my acai berry product, but stuck only to white hat seo techniques, I would literally never rank for that keyword. I would never get that traffic, never get the exposure, because there are people out there who are taking advantage of the holes in Google's algo while I am "sticking to the rules".
You have to remember that Google publishes rules for 2 reasons: 1) so that you don't participate in shady tactics that polute the internet (for the greater good) and 2) because their job is to clean up search results so the less "spam" that is produced, the easier their job is.
I'd be pretty sure he means whitehat SEO, on-page optimisations, link-building (eg linkbait, social networks) .. not frowned on by Google.
Edit: or maybe not!