Ian,
I take your point and yes, PPC is fairly steady overall.
We may be talking about similar stuff. I class web marketing as anything that does not involve touching the website. Most of what you are advocating fits into this category. I do not personally, see it as waste of time though.
I looked at some general CC queries in different cities today. There were three or four different layouts of the search results in different parts of the country. One was back to the original Google local stuff. This may have been due to my IP address influencing things but I suspect that Places is still in a state of flux and different things are still being tested.
In the USA, some results are being produced with the web listing and places page blended together and surprise, sirprise, those at the top seem to have the most backlinks. All interesting (but frustrating) times.
Garry