If I may put a bit of a cultural spin on this, his comment sort of reflects the culture in India, where a vast majority of people do not feel comfortable simply asking for a raise. Most people (men and women) essentially follow the strategy that Nadella suggested, to work harder and believe that you will be rewarded for it eventually. I'm not in any way suggesting that this is an effective strategy (especially for women), but it might explain his comment somewhat. Great apology, though.
That true. They could've simply linked to the IE9 download page.
But I think MS's algorithm would have de-ranked the site because any IR algorithm considers the content of the page too - if the web page served to IE users is about redirecting to browser download pages, their crawler (which may identify itself as IE) might not consider it to be the best result about 'Kogan'.
You know why? It's because Google makes it easy to spot the sponsored link if you spend more than half a second on it before clicking. A yellow background and text that says 'Sponsored Link' is way less deceiving than the lack of a 'like' button.
The devil is in the details. And the significant amount of justification you do in your post shows that you're trying to convince yourself as much as us that it's OK.