Lacking want and when: Moken on 60 Minutes

While I consider myself a fan of some of the basic premises of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I do get slightly irritated when I hear news stories reporting on the dearth or plethora of words in a particular language for a particular concept.
Perhaps Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log said it best :

Here's some advice. Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.

This is, of course, the same Geoffrey Pullum who wrote The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language.

Well, tonight, 60 Minutes had a report on the Moken, a group of people living in and around the Thai and Burmese islands in the Indian ocean. While the story was primarily about how the Moken managed to survive the tsunami, Bob Simon incredulously yet gleefully reported that the language (Moken, Austronesian), lacks words for want and when.
This was vexing on several levels.
First, it feeds into the stereotype of unindustrialized cultures as lacking a sense of urgency and not caring about material possessions.
Second, let's take a look at a few of the quotes:

And Ivanoff says "when" is not the only word missing from the Moken language. "Want" is another. "Yes, you use it very often," says Ivanoff. "Take that out of your language and you see how often you use it. 'I want this, I want that.'"

This is French anthropologist Jacques Ivanoff, who I hope wasn't playing to the straw-man Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that is so plainly wrong and is being taken out of context.
What does it mean, exactly, to miss a word from your language? It seems to imply that there is a universal collection of words from which languages' lexicons are built which goes agaisnt the well-supported theory that languages package semantic concepts in different ways; languages will almost always lack one-to-one word-to-word mappings with any other language.
Also, are they including bound morphemes or other grammatical constructs in the definition of word? Could the language have an irrealis marker or some way of marking epistemic stance through tense, for example, as a way of indicating that something hasn't happened, but the speaker wants it to? What about a word for hope or need?

Finally, the quote:

But the Moken don’t seem terribly worried by all this. Perhaps that’s because "worry" is just one more of those words that don’t exist in their language.

feeds into the misconception that lacking a word (whatever word means here) in a language prohibits speakers' conceptualization of the idea. It seems unlikely that the Moken have no concept of desire, or want and is even less likely that they have no concept of time. Lacking the (wh-question) word when says very little about their ability to question temporal aspects of events. English lacks an single WH-word questioning degree or amount so that we have to say "To what degree does ...?" or "How much ...?" Does this say anything about our conceptualization of quantity? Perhaps the Moken simply use the paraphrase "At what time...?"

Taking Geoffrey's quote to heart, I sincerely question the accuracy of Ivanoff or Bob Simon's claims on all levels. Unfortunately, this story perpetuates this grating linguistic myth in the eyes of public and not even for positive ends, such as the drawing of attention to cultural diversity, but rather to corroborate the misconception of unindustrialized island dwellers as not having a care in the world.

At first, I just found the story mildly annoying, but now I'm starting to get a little mad... it's Miller time.