I suspect Dan is closer to right than wrong - particularly on the FTC angle.
In addition to the points I made earlier, Google driving up the price of patents works against them too. It's not as if Motorola doesn't seem what the going rate of Nortel and Interdigital patents are. In fact just last week Motorola said they were open to doing WP phones. That was purely a way to get the last dollar on the selling price.
My point is that Google didn't get AppleSoft to pay all that much since they did it consortium style. And the price Google paid for Motorola was probably higher than it needed to be if Motorola didn't value their patents with respect to prices they saw in the Nortel deal (and they're not stupid enough to have missed it).