I hate to be a cynic but if you take the cost savings on cutting safety corners across all their operations (rigs, refineries, etc) for the time the company has been operating them, I bet they still came out on top and BP wouldn't change a damn thing about how they operate short of some regulatory body (lol MMS) forcing them to.

If you RTFA:

"According to the patent application, users could also choose to access the advertisements when they choose, delaying an ad by 10 minutes, or choosing to watch one immediately. This would help to ensure that the ad is not overly intrusive, appearing while the user was in the middle of an important task."

You're right they aren't "randomly bombarding users with ads" they are "regularly bombarding users with ads".

While I agree that a single test wouldn't account for any variance and thus isn't very accurate as one system may have just "gotten lucky" that day, Google Navigation along with many other high-end sat navs pull traffic data to avoid congestion due to local traffic, car accidents, or adorable families of ducks. This is why each system probably recommended different routes instead of the geographically shortest route which you'd except to be fairly consistent.

Damn imagine how much Apple could've raked in if they had of named it eMac, ePod, ePad, ePhone... Those poor saps using "eMail" would never stand a chance in court! They should've picked a different name after all, sheesh.

Oh god, car analogy... Why am I even bothering with this?

This (your terrible analogy) would more be like Honda removing your in-dash espresso machine (jailbreaking software) every time you bring the car in for an oil change (updating your iOS for some stupid bugfixes).