So, does non-China android regularly ping google.com, and could that have privacy implications?

My first thought is this could be a non-malicious but perhaps not fully thought out bugfix: wi-fi connection status detection sporadically fails behind the GFW when queries to google don't resolve, let's pick a similarly dominant site on the other side of the firewall as an alternative. Apparently someone at Samsung then noticed and decided to use a Samsung .cn site instead in the latest patch.