Reducing ad ridden sites is great, but they are doing that in a roundabout way and taking down potentially useful sites in the process.

The point is not that sites with ads at the top should be as high in the results as sites without ads, but that using such a high-level heuristic (as they claim) is a poor way to lower (or raise) the rank of a page.

Google could also do a lot more work to show you WHERE on the page your search occurs. That would do a lot more to address the problem than just lowering the rank of pages where your search is lower on the page.