No, Google's customers are its advertisers. They're the ones who pay money to Google.
I agree with your general point though, the algorithm isn't perfect and sometimes it goofs. What I think people are having a negative reaction to is Matt Cutts' seemingly obtuse responses, as though he doesn't even understand the issue at hand (Google's actions distorting natural behavior), so he just keeps explaining the anti-spam policies in general terms. It's not a conversation, it's people talking past one another.
Think of some of the stereotypes of engineers. Many can code but struggle to communicate. Matt can code, has his name on many patents, leads a team, makes hundreds or thousands of videos, regularly keynotes at conferences & interacts with thousands of people, was GoogleGuy for years, participates in the comments here, was an expert in some of the past lawsuits against Google ... he has basically had a near infinite number of opportunities to put his foot in his mouth & yet how many times has he ever done it? Almost never, if ever.
About the only times I think he has potentially missed at all was the "breaking their spirits" bit on TWIG, and then two minor bits in a few YouTube videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muZuX9OaMLo&feature=youtu.be&... "We got less spam and so it looks like people don't like the new algorithms as much."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jap11IIxfw "the gap between what you can get away with and what google says you can get away with is getting smaller all the time"
---
Who do you know who has as much media exposure as he has had who hasn't repeatedly put their foot in their mouth? For me, that answer is nobody.
---
What makes Matt's performance even more impressive is how scummy some of Google's policies have been, even as he came off smelling like roses. There are endless debates on how reasonable it is for Google to infer intent on links & so on, yet at the same time some of the past Google executive emails have quotes in them like:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/google-faces-new-pres... "As with all of our policies, we do not verify what these sites actually do, only what they claim to do." (for AdWords advertisers)
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-... "I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this. thanks Eric"
No, Google's customers are primarily its advertisers. Optimizing advertising revenue has some overlap with pleasing users, as you note, but if a decision needed to be made between pleasing users and increasing revenue, there's no doubt about which way it would go.
I suppose any company that works out how to increase revenue while upsetting and alienating it's users could possibly implement said ideas. But if you're smart enough to do that, I would guess you would also be pretty successful at the traditional approach of increasing revenue by pleasing your users?
Matt Cutts' job at Google involves him making tons of videos explaining how the Google algorithm works. It isn't omniscient, and the guidelines show how to work within its limitations. If you don't care about optimizing your Google presence (as we don't) then you shouldn't care about Google's guidelines either. But if you do comply with some guidelines, then this will probably help your rank in other search engines which also take similar measures to TRY and detect linkspam.
Google's customers are its users. It tries hard to have the most relevant results (or provide value some other way, or just maintain a brand image so people keep coming back). The advertisers come because the users find them and spend real money. And the users want relevant search results, not spam. That's why Google spends a ton of resources on combating the spam.
How do you propose they magically "know" when a link is natural?