I don't know about others,
I don't know about others, but I have owned a number of sports cars, foreign and domestic, rear and all-wheel drive (never owned a FWD car). One thing I can say for sure is that I was more impressed by the power diesel 3-series BMW than I was by the 333 BHP I-6 that was in my E46 M3, and that car wasn't even sold as a sports car.
For a variety historical reasons, diesels got pigeon-holed as dirty, loud, low-torque power plants that should only be used in trucks, tractors, and cheap-fuel-burning econoboxes. This thinking about the engines has persisted, even after the reasons have dissipated. Diesels can now run quiet and clean, and the combination of their low-end torque and the impossibility of detonation make for awesomely great fodder for the performance market.
Manufacturers that have shed the embarrassingly out-dated misconceptions of diesels have done amazing things. Look at the record of the Audi R10 TDI as a great case study. Nobody was plowing fields, towing 53' boxes of cargo, or hyper-miling between Paris and Munich in that beast -- it was being used to blow away the best gas-based performance engines that elite racing engineers were able to assemble. Who wouldn't want something like that under their hood? Maybe the fact that this innovation came from a German company makes it feel un-American, but try to tell Gates Performance that using diesels for high-powered automotive excess is un-American.
What confuses me about the article is that a writer exposed to all of this information wouldn't react in any way other than to ask "why did it take so long to do this?" or "why isn't Ford introducing the diesel Mustang in the US first?" The only un-American thing I can find in all of this is that this thing might be sold anywhere BUT the US market. Even if the point of putting a diesel in the car is for fuel economy instead of performance, I guarantee that the (American) diesel tuning companies would be all over it, making kits available that would make the GT models look like kids toys. That's what America does. Why not give it a chance?