Nothing isn't nothing?

I've recently had a dispute with a person who argued that Lawrence Krauss does not argue for a universe literally coming from nothing.  That person argued that Krauss's "nothing" is explained by Krauss as "nothing isn't nothing in physics any longer."  I argued that Krauss was taken out of context, with the ~nothing "nothing" representing the features of space in an existent universe, which obviously can't apply until time and space fully exist.  I located an interview of Krauss that helps cinch my argument.  A transcript of the relevant portion, starting at about 7:17, follows.

MP:

I had someone who asked if you could explain what, what the nothing before the big bang was.  It-It's one of those concepts that--nothing-- we depend on, on, on interactions with objects, and things, the idea of nothing is sort of beyond comprehension.  What does the nothing before the big bang actually mean?

LK:

Well, it could be many things.  It could be there was empty space.  It was empty space--space existed but it was completely empty--or it could be that space itself didn't exist and it came into existence bef--with the big bang.  That's hard for people to picture, but space is--general relativity tells us space itself, that features of space depend on the nature of matter and it's dynamical and it's certainly possible that the laws of quantum mechanics caused literally space to suddenly come into being.  And so, there could have been nothing, there could have even, even been (gap of silence)

And there are laws of physics, of course, and those existed, but it could even be that even the laws of physics came into existence at the same time as space did.  And, uh, what we know is that (garbled) is consistent with a universe that came from nothing.  And it's kind of remarkable because it didn't have to be that way.

In the portion where the audio was garbled during Krauss's close I take to refer to his claim that observations of the makeup of our universe are consistent with the notion that the net energy of the universe is zero.  But it simply wasn't possible for me to create an accurate transcript of that portion because of the distorted audio.

Krauss has a book ("A Universe From Nothing") coming out in February (apparently Feb. 2012--bww).  I trust that the book will help erase lingering doubts about the author's position on cosmology.  That is, if people refuse to accept that his title is deliberately misleading if he's talking about a nothing that isn't nothing.