It’s interesting that Google had to come out and say it plainly. I never thought there was a penalty for duplicate content to begin with, the only issue with it is that the page with the duplicate content may not be in the search results since Google doesn’t want the results showing 1,000 pages with the exact same content on it. So all they do is decide which page(s) are the strongest and show them.
Duplicate content won’t hurt your website, but it also won’t help it much either.