There's nothing to infer from a denial of a petition for certiorari, and there's certainly no precedential weight to it. And there's actually precedential weight to the fact that a denial has none :)

It is true that they implicitly affirmed the decision in this particular case, but as to the larger question of copyrightability of APIs, as I mention above, the reasoning for denial could just as easily be they didn't think this case would be a good test for that question for whatever reason.

Wikipedia cites a few cases in which the Supreme Court has explicitly stated this in [1] (see paragraph starting with "Conversely...")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certiorari#Federal_courts

Nope, I didn't downvote you. I think the rest of what you wrote is pretty accurate. I also don't think Google will capitulate. I think they're moving to OpenJDK to limit their downside, but I think they're doing it with the idea of fighting it out.