This is incorrect:

All the rest of the noise and turmoil is bullshit and a tempest in a teapot, since part of the settlement will be you can opt-out of Google's publish on demand system if your works would count as 'orphaned works' and if your books are still published, then Google doesn't get the rights to sell you anything, without your explicit permission.

An orphaned work is one that is still in copyright whose author cannot be found. By definition, a bona fide orphaned work can't be claimed since the author can't be found. An orphaned work is also almost certainly out of print.

If you have an in-copyright but out of print book that was scanned by Google, you really need to either opt-out of the settlement and pursue Google for the copyright infringement on your own, or you need to claim your book(s). I should note that most publishing contracts contain a Reversion of Rights clause by which the rights licensed to the publisher revert to the author after a book is out of print for some period of time. The reversion clause is rarely straightforward and it would be possible for an author to have signed a contract without such a clause.

An author with OOP books can claim those books and also elect to withdraw them from Google Books.

The point about Google ending up with effective control of their digitized copies of orphaned works is much knottier. It does, in my opinion, represent a windfall for Google since they are able to exclusively, it would seem, exploit those books. Supposedly, some of those profits are supposed to be redistributed to authors who opted in.

Sadly, the Author's Guild (of which I am a member) doesn't seem to have a very good understanding of technology. I suspect Google took full advantage of that in the settlement.

It can't. You are still the copyright owner, and your work is not orphaned. Keep in mind that Out of Print does not necessarily mean your rights have reverted to you. Your publisher may still hold those rights. You'll need to refer to your contract to find out when your rights have been deemed to have reverted to you. You may need to formally request those rights back from your publisher. If you had an agent when you sold your book, you might want to give him or her a call. You need to claim your out of copyright book(s) via the Google Settlement page. Then Google has to 1) Pay you and 2) give you a cut of any advertising revenue, or you can decide to remove your book from Google Books. My experience has been that the settlement claim process has a pretty crappy search. It did not return my OOP books until I went to Google Books to search for them (and discovered they had incorrect meta data about the books), but that process will give you enough information to locate and claim your books, in print and out of print. Basically, if you're a copyright owner and your books are in Google books, you need to opt-out or go claim your books.

Literary Agent Janet Reid has a rather scathing rebuttal to Chu's article which Reid (who has actually read the settlement, something Chu did not do) feels is spectacularly uninformed and incorrect. I tend to agree with Reid. (FYI, I am an author whose in copyright books were scanned by Google. I am a member of the class.)

Well, I AM a book author and I can tell you writers do average about $5,000 per year. Stephen King and Dean Koontz are hardly the average author, by the way. Half of all the money I earn goes right back to the government for taxes. Authors are also expected to do their own promotion. Only the really prominent authors get significant push from their publishers. The rest of us are strictly DIY. There goes the rest of the advance money. The vast majority of published novels do not earn out their advance. There are several publishers who now offer first time advances of $1000. Authors wait 9 months to year to see their book in a store and then wait 6 months to more than a year to see the first royalty statement (which famously makes little to no sense). And actually, most authors are in another line of work. I think it's something less than 5% of authors who are able to support themselves on their fiction. The rest of us have day jobs. I haven't decided what to think about book piracy. I know my books have been pirated, but I don't know if those represent sales lost to me. I do know that I was mighty P.O'd when Google decided it could scan and post books that were still in print and selling, without asking question one to the person who held the copyright. To my knowledge, they weren't offering to share the ad revenue with the authors.