Of course, they have to spin it some way, because they're years past the point they could be honest and believed. I think it's more likely one google engineer wanted to resist the constant invasion of privacy and likely ended up paying with his job.
App Ops throws SecurityExceptions when you try to access a permission, it doesn't return empty data. You can imagine that most apps didn't build exception handling into the feature access that is required in the manifest at install time. That is the primary reason why it is not a fully public feature for users.
