wordpress / hot taco

(typo in the title on purpose, i’m not sending any traffic their way).
my friend phil just called me with some questions about the wordpress / hot taco thing. he looked at a cached version of one of the articles and noticed that the only ads on there were google ads.
very interesting. so, this whole “controversy” gets revealed and then google removes wordpress’ page ranking. but curiously, not before then. was it that google can’t detect when they are being “gamed” by 168,000 “fraudulent” articles? or is it because they had ads on each of those 168,ooo articles, and were collecting revenue on them?
there must be some part of the picture i am not seeing here. who got “gamed”?

i guess my question is this: if, suddenly, 168,000 pages of content composed solely of the highest-ranked SEO search words appear under one domain name, shouldn’t that somehow raise a red flag in google’s software? especially if it is also feeding ads to all those pages?

i really think i must be missing something here.