If you look at the top sites for pretty much any competitive search query you'll see they're all doing this.

It is what Google has created.

I agree with Jill. I'm not sure why it's such big news to be honest.

For a long time, Google had major advertisers intimidiated into thinking they couldn't get away with black-hat SEO techniques. When Goldman Sachs took Demand Media, whose entire business is based on spamming Google, public in a billion-dollar IPO, spamming Google became mainstream Now it's recognized that Google can only detect the most blatant link farms. Google's real protection against spam has been intimidation, That's no longer working. The mainstream press now gets this.

Jill's "Dear Google...Stop Making Me Look Like a Fool!" article from last September says this best. Since she wrote that, the problem has become worse, not better.

@Nagle, I'm not sure that it's gotten worse. But overall it hasn't gotten much better either. You might be interested in the follow up article I just did last week:

Does Google Spam Still Work Post-Panda