I would disagree that this is an "edge case;" it's a rather fundamental feature of DNS that is relied on every time a record from one domain references a record in another domain. The dot at the end fully qualifies the name and makes it unambiguous. Without the dot, unqulified DNS names are treated as members of their parent SOA. This is why when creating CNAME or NS or MX records that reference a foreign domain, you have to specify a dot at the end, and when you don't they dont resolve as expected.
So a machine with a search domain of 'foo.com' looking up 'www.google.com' should ideally seek the record for 'www.google.com.foo.com' first. Conversely, looking up 'www.google.com.' is more specific and returns google's ip even if 'www.google.com.foo.com' were to exist.
The reason it's not common is because all DNS client behaviors have been modified for convenience to avoid this; in basically every resolver any query containing at least one dot is automatically treated as if it were a fully qualified name. So behind the scenes, the DNS resolver is caring very much about the trailing dot and adding it to nearly every query; it's just typically hidden from users.