I don't think this bodes well for the quality of Google's search results.

What if someone asks to have a page on my blog removed because it talks about them. Do I get to contest it, am I notified at all. What recourse do I have if my income is affected by the removal of the page.

"Google said it would assess each request"; manually processing each request sounds like a terrible way to handle this. Will spammers use this as an attack vector until it's automated, at which point they can start to have competitors pages removed.

I think any manually tampering with the SERPs is a slippery slope to bad quality.