Regarding point 1, to add to that weirdness, all of this closely followed the massive App Store success of Threes, which 2048 is nearly a clone of (and I understand that Threes is nearly a clone of another earlier game).
I wasn't sure, but I thought that there was an even older game that was extremely similar to 2048 and Threes. I remember people got upset when the Threes developers accused 2048 of cloning them [0], because they thought Threes was itself a clone of something earlier.