This is an excellent post: short, to the point and helpful. However, I find the title slightly misleading. Performance is not the only form of technical debt. Arguably, there are forms that are even worse than performance. If you're looking for the generic recipe for breaking out of the typical technical debt nightmare, the solution isn't in this post. Doesn't mean you shouldn't read it, though ;)
I agree. I always considered maintainability to be the main part of technical debt. You do it quickly, but only you understand how it works. Then you refactor it (preferably against [unit] tests). Nobody wants unmaintainable code in their codebase yet it sometimes appears...
The only aspect of performance I would consider technical debt is how your software scales. When you have 2x as many users will the load be 2+epsilon times higher or 10 times. Or what if 10% of your users performed some action at the same time.
