What he's really saying is that whether you use JPA or JDBC, you should put a layer of abstraction between the client of the data and the source of the data.
One nice benefit of JPA is, out of the box, it's actually pretty speedy since you get a free second level cache.
You'd have to add in your own cache if you're write pure JDBC.
The cache does have a noticable affect of the "snap" of an application, though it's a two edge sword and can at times be a pain to work with.
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