Does Google REALLY use the canonical as a poor man's 301?

Rob Snell's CANONICAL test --- success=URL w/o parameters

... 16 hours or so later Today is STILL FRI JUNE 12

ADDED THIS   link rel="canonical" href="http://www.robsnell.com/canonical-test.html"/ 

If this page ranks for "Rob Snell's Wacky Canonical Test" or "Rob Snell's REALLY Wacky Canonical Test" without the parameters showing, I think that shows it works..."

Here's what I was told:

• CANON Duplicate content solutions and the canonical tag. The most important thing about the new canonical link element, which appears in your head tags. According to the 100 flowers guy, is that it opens of discussions about site architecture which is pretty important.
• CANON 1) Fix your site architecture first to maximize PageRank. Start at the homepage and ONLY link to the most important sections, articles, and products. Matt Cutts said same.
• CANON 2) Add canonical link element to every page to make sure the right pages get credit for PageRank with the search engines. Search engines treat the canonical link element that is a poor man's 301 redirect.
• CANON Since Yahoo! Stores have static URLS it’s not as critical, but first you need to do the Y! 301 all Store URLS and all non WWW URLS, then do the Canonical tag.
• CANON Important: Canonical only works on the same domain or across subdomains.
• CANON Very important: Google says do not use the canonical to point to a URL that you're going to 301 (permanently redirect) or it won’t count. This is to prevent spammy hijinks.
• CANON Yahoo! Store application: Maybe this canonical link element is an easy way to fix “bad” IDs. Let's test it and find out. Having the keyword in the URL (which is the Yahoo! Store ID) is more important now for SEO. Improves the link, looks better, too.
• CANON PB: Individual 301s would be better IMHO.
• CANON Adam Audette -- does search engine optimization for Zappos. He said canonical helps with sorting pages, multiple subdomains, PPC landing pages, and appended tracking URLs. Squeeze internal PageRank on the same domain with link canonical. Update old URLs. Someone needs to test this.
• CANON Where would you have parameter URLs? Campaign tracking, Affiliate links, Internal click tracking with Yahoo Web analytics and Google analytics. YSTORE: RTML create a new field: name Canonical-ID, type: IDS. RTML template uses uf then to canonical to self, unless there is an ID inside the canonical ID field
• SUPPLEMENTAL Question: How can I see what pages from my Yahoo store are in the supplemental index in Google? No cache showing?
• Question: How can I get cache dates of all my pages? Google Webmaster Tools export of last crawl to see how trusted your pages are?
• CANON Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts.com. Got this guy’s slides! Read em. Canonical influences site links. Recover lost PageRank.
• CANON Watch out for XML site maps. Only list the pages you want crawled. These guys are pretty controlling about wanting the top pages to get crawled, indexed, and ranked in the Google.
• CANON SS says NOINDEX leaks PageRank but NOFOLLOW blocks PageRank passage.
• CANON DRAMA: Matt Cutts and Stephen Spencer get into a somewhat heated discussion on PageRank sculpting using NOFOLLOW tags.
• CANON Y TIP: If you have multiple domains pointing at your Yahoo store, you need to use 301 permanent redirects, but canonical will fix that.
• TIP: Use the omitted results on Google to see all of duplicate pages.
• Y! Question: Are there any URLs with parameters indexed in Google because there should not be! Check and see!
• CANON GOOGLE BUSTED: Stephan Spencer had an example on how Google was not using the canonical correctly on the Wikipedia listing for podcasting. So maybe Google is not actually doing this?
• TIP: Cached text – Add &strip=1 to see cached text only.
• CANON: BAD: Pagination reduces crawl equity. Previous, up, next, one, two, three, four. Do we need no follow these?
• GOOG TIP: Google does not want your internal store search results pages in the Google results, so don’t allow them (Y! doesn’t). If so, make sure indexed serps look like category pages.
• CANON -- Looks like affiliate URLs with now non-naked links will pass PageRank. Canonical means you get credit for affiliate URLs. Even with parameters. TEST TO MAKE SURE OK? With URLS with parameters. First get the URLS with parameters crawled, then CANON
• Now it’s ok to use clicktrack tagged URLs: This means will be able to see where folks are clicking whether on the breadcrumbs, thumbnail picture, anchor text underneath, sidebar nav links, normal Y! navigation, or any embedded hyperlink in the caption field. Pretty cool. I’m tagging: breadcrumbs, icon, link, site map, internal.