I think you've hit the nail on the head.

On a related point: what would have happened had Bloch not been able to come up with a rangeCheck function quickly?

Would Google have stopped Android from shipping until it was complete? It's more likely they would have just left it as a bug to be fixed later.

He only copied it because he was planning to submit the code to the OpenJDK and writing his own would have led to unnecessary duplication of code. The copied code would no longer be needed when the new code was added to the same package.

Bashing it out cowboy style would have been faster and in no way harmed Android. It's Oracle's codebase he was spending time and energy improving with good engineering practice.

I don't dispute your statement.

My point is specifically related to Oracle's claim that Android couldn't have shipped without a rangeCheck() function, which is patently nonsense.

My point is that it's worse than nonsense, it's actually arguing the opposite of the truth. The "copying", rather than speeding up Android development to Google's benefit, actually slowed Android development in an attempt to help OpenJDK/Oracle.

That this is the only direct copyright infringement they could find is highly ironic, but I guess either the lawyers didn't understand the subtleties here, or thought the jury wouldn't as this argument wasn't made (except obliquely in Bloch's statements).

I think it was mentioned that this code was used in testing other code - when you're reverse-engineering, conformance testing is about as critical as you can get. You could start coding without it, but it's quicker to catch bugs early. [NB: I don't know whether it actually is used in testing]