This guy was actually a customer, he had made several purchases that were locked up in his account. With Google Play, every user is at least a potential paying customer, so there's really no excuse for this lack of customer service.

It is possible that the reason their customer service is so terrible sometimes is because the culture still doesn't necessarily think of users as customers. But they've got strong competition from Apple, at least, so I would expect this kind of situation to get better once they manage that mind shift.