Is it just me, or is iTunes Match a "scam"?

All right, so here are a few disturbing observations I've made while using the new (for the rest of us) service of iTunes Match...

1st observation:

I have some songs in my library marked by iTunes Match as "Matched" which had wrong tags on purpose... for example, take... Carlos Gardel's "Por una cabeza".

Since I didn't have this song's album name, I tagged it under the album field: "Search for album..." in order to remind me of searching the corresponding album for that particular song. Well... iTunes Match happened to match this song anyway! So I deleted it in order to download the "higher quality" version which is supposedly, already in the iTunes Store servers (I don't know why since I don't even know which album(s) have this version of the song).

2nd observation:

So I have a song named "Lambada" with no artist tag, same "Search for album..." album tag and nothing else. Well... iTunes Match managed to find my song and allowed me to download a higher quality version of it!

3rd observation:

I have a faulty song from Telepopmusik's Genetic World album, more than 8 minutes long (because of like... 3 minutes of silence this file has), when this song is supposed to have a play time of 5:05 or something. And yes... iTunes Match, found my 8 minutes version and when I deleted my file, I downloaded the higher quality version of... 8 minutes (with the added 3 mins silence song)! (which iTunes Store doesn't even have in its catalogue...)

So after thinking about this for a minute... I've reached the following conclusion...

1. iTunes Match doesn't use tags as a method for matching songs. (otherwise, my Lambada song would be impossible to match)

2. iTunes Match seems to just locally convert your songs to an AAC version (and not downloading the iTunes Store catalogue song, even though it says so), otherwise, my Telepopmusik's song would be transformed into the iTunes catalogue 5 min version of the same song...

3. If those theories are correct, then yes... we are paying for the songs we already had in the first place, with no song upgrading whatsoever (not one you could've easily achieved by just right clicking a song and choosing - CREATE AAC VERSION).

Please correct me if there is anything fallacious in my reasoning... I'm just a little disturbed about this...

Best.