One obvious and very public example of how the algorithm matters more than the index size would be Cuil. It was launched with lots of hype about how it would have a index several times larger than Google's. And of course the results were notoriously bad.

I'm stunned that anyone could think that the core issue in this controversy is indexing or page discovery. It should have been totally obvious from the examples in the initial article and blog post that this was specifically about copying ranking.