Yeah, hilarious.

: Pretty interesting that it's such a long and detailed VO line. Wonder why it
: got cut from "normal" play.

I voiced some thoughts on that in my article. Basically, the level design got changed, so you no longer met Johnson in that first area. Shame to lose such a great speech though!

: As to the shade launch... can you defeat the normal fall time by riding the
: turret all the way down, bypassing the usual bridge descent pain? Or is
: this a PAL/easy only trick?

That Shade ride is only practical on PAL (Easy is irrelevant), thanks to being able to fall further. I'm not aware of anyone making it all the way to the ground on NTSC/PC - though someone did at least make it to the ledge.