I don't think Locaha's inability to experience themselves as Bill Gates is unusual in the slightest. I suspect most of us are unable to do so.
Also, I haven't said a word about Bill Gates' memory and whatnot. If having all Bill Gates' memories and whatnot is necessary for someone to be Bill Gates, then very few people indeed are capable of it. (Indeed, there are plausible circumstances under which Bill Gates himself would no longer be capable of being Bill Gates.)
Scott Aaronson has a new 85 page essay up, titled "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine". (Abstract here.) In Section 2.11 (Singulatarianism) he explicitly mentions Eliezer as an influence. But that's just a starting point, and he then moves in a direction that's very far from any kind of LW consensus. Among other things, he suggests that a crucial qualitative difference between a person and a digital upload is that the laws of physics prohibit making perfect copies of a person. Personally, I find the arguments completely unconvincing, but Aaronson is always thought-provoking and fun to read, and this is a good excuse to read about things like (I quote the abstract) "the No-Cloning Theorem, the measurement problem, decoherence, chaos, the arrow of time, the holographic principle, Newcomb's paradox, Boltzmann brains, algorithmic information theory, and the Common Prior Assumption". This is not just a shopping list of buzzwords, these are all important components of the author's main argument. It unfortunately still seems weak to me, but the time spent reading it is not wasted at all.