I think you're trying too hard to rationalize Google's claims.
With regard to the 1-in-1000 signals, clearly they have that many signals because not all 1000 signals are strong for every query. In Google's case, they "Googlebombed" Bing, but instead of using the "anchor" signal (which most people use to alter Google's results), they chose the "click stream" signal. Google specifically chose scenarios where the other 999 signals weren't being used.
If I had a toolbar installed on millions of machines where people opted-in to send me their click activity, I could start a search engine that used only click stream data to rank results. You'd be seeing the ranking effected by all sorts of sites including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc... As it should, the ranking would be effected by the click activity that users perform on the most popular websites. Effectively I'd have crowd sourced my ranking. If Google is returning a result for a particular person's name, but Facebook's click stream activity is returning a fan page for that person's name which is clicked on more frequently than the Google result, then the Facebook result would show up in my search engine for that person's name.
All Google did here was choose a scenario where every other signal wasn't being used by Bing, effectively turning Bing into the click-stream search engine described above. Furthermore, Google chose a scenario where even within this single signal, they were the only input to it. All Google did was googlebomb Bing. Any well trafficked website could do the same.
It's ridiculous the lengths people will go to while trying to discredit Microsoft. Bing has built a generalized system that partially learns rankings through behaviors observed on high-reputation websites. That's it.
And no they shouldn't remove Google from the signal because that'd imply they've done something wrong.