Just remember that 95% of the people using the web are not WMs or have much savvy when it comes to really digging around for stuff - they either fire up their ISPs software (Earthlink, AOL whatever) or they have a homepage set to Yahoo,Excite or any of the other wonderful portal pages. The real competition for searchers is at this level - and I can guarantee that my mother-in-law is going to use whatever search appliance is "installed" for her when she connects to the internet - no matter what the quality is - either that or she's gonna remember the tv ad about Yahoo or the fact that her favorite character on "As the Stomach Turns" googled somebody
Thats where the base money is for these comapanies - not in what we think the best quality SE is for "spam" results or filtering/ranking concepts.