Peter, I agree with you there - but its not as if google will read your page and think, oh, that was a great read, I loved his writing style etc. It scans your page contents and picks out keywords - that's all content is good for in terms of SEO.

HOWEVER - when people, the billions you are speaking of, mention content as king. They mention it, not so it can just be crawled, but so that it can create link backs, repeat visits etc.