Alex can you honestly say you didn't feel a flush of self-satisfaction when you first saw your site on the first page of a Google search? Come on, you can admit it. I've posted my own Googleshots, and so have many others for lots of reasons other than self-promotion. I posted mine in an act of compulsive self-deprecation.
I'm mostly joking, of course, but I think in advertising one must go with what works (keeping ethics and law in mind, of course). And as long as Google is, in web users' minds, the be-all and end-all of searching, any placement on that golden first page is going to be promotion that pays off.
Maybe Robin was too zealous in his posting for your taste. That's arguable. But what isn't arguable is that Google has become its own environment where sites will jockey for position however they can, until Google tightens up loopholes like the one you point out.
