Jeff,
Do you continue to interact with Matt Cutts on this matter? Matt’s opinion would be most interesting and most convincing.
You have not provided any material evidence any particular search, etc. to prove what you said in this article. Do you own any statistics? I admire StackOverflow, I know that you are a well know person in Web / programming circles, but it lately became very fashionable to attack Google.
Somewhat related article was published on TechCrunch (no real data either) at http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/
I’m pretty sure there will be related discussion in Google Buzz, hopefully with Google employees, including Matt Cutts at
http://goo.gl/6eVTw
http://goo.gl/xCDsD
Thanks