rel="nofollow" is only useful for pages which are intended to be indexed, google's search results pages are not, which is why they don't use it for the links in search results.
The point is: up until now search indexing has had a robust opt-out mechanism. Bing has changed that and has muddied the waters with vague hand-waving. The question still remains: should there still be a way for sites to opt-out of search indexing? If so, then why can't robots.txt continue to be that mechanism? If robots.txt can't be that mechanism then what should be the new standard. If not, then that opens an entirely new can of worms. A can that I think we're better off not opening.