Raymond still works for Microsoft so he has to toe the company line.
On the other hand, articles from people like Andrew Schulman and Matt Pietrek (before he got bought out by MS) are far more explicit about the truth.
As for being more advanced than NT, it depends what you consider "more advanced"; a traditional OS, or a hypervisor? It certainly takes some effort to wrap your head around the VxD driver model of the latter, while the former is quite straightforward.
Not really. There was no Ring -1 (hypervisor), no hardware-assisted virtualization as we use the term today. On Windows/386, it ran in Ring 0.
Virtual 8086 mode was leveraged via the NTVDM, shipping with the first release of NT.