1) Nobody with any actual knowledge about the analysis spoke with anyone who then blogged about it. These people know better. What actually happened was that people in CMS and ATLAS, who don't work on the Higgs analysis, saw the Higgs plots during internal discussions and then told their theorist, blogger friends roughly what they saw.
2) The most familiar exclusion plots are showing the line at which the cross section is excluded at 95% along with the 2-sigma uncertainty on the expected location of this curve. Since the people spreading rumors are not very familiar with the analysis, they do not realize that n-sigma deviations between the observed and expected lines are not the same thing as n-sigma observations. The actual significance of observation will usually be lower.
3) Again because the people spreading rumors are not familiar with the analysis, they are not able to add appropriate caveats about systematic uncertainties, which can substantially reduce significance. Because these rumors started last week, I guarantee the plots on which they were based do not include all systematic effects. And because the bloggers are predominantly theorists, they don't have the experience to add that information themselves either.
So I hope you will take rumors for what they are: rumors.