I don't think it's entirely true that the current Google results are merely a matter of decent sites being hard to find. I'm pretty sure that two years ago, Google found a great portion of "real content" pages than it finds today and SEO was already huge then. And Google does a significant amount of human testing right now.

It especially noticeable to me that just in the last few months, Google has changed their algorithm so some product will be the first item on even the most generic search.