"Otherwise they have a very similar method of cloaking detection, a similar policy for punishment, and a similar timeline for reducing the punishment for cloaking… At this point I feel that there are too many coincidences for this to be mere chance."

I disagree. The realities of having to work in the real world will tend to push Google and Bing in the same directions, even if their development is fully independent. The possibility of independent implementations of similar policies is not so unlikely that it justifies accusations of copying. I think you need more evidence.

Besides, it can't flow along the pathways that were previously established to my satisfaction (YMMV). If I understand it correctly, the Bing toolbar analyzes click patterns to see how pages connect together on the web, Google used the Bing toolbar while making their spiked searches, and found that small amounts of that signal made it into Bing, which was exposed when they created searches by design that had no other signal. I'd lay money the Bing toolbar now has an exclusion for Google (and probably other search sites), if only because Google demonstrated it opens an attack vector from the competition. And I do not think the Bing toolbar could pick up on cloaking like this, because that would rest solely on Google's internal servers. I'm not even sure by what mechanism Bing could be copying this signal from Google.