According to TFA, "In Yosemite, all Safari web searches are sent to not only the search engine you've selected ... but also to Apple..."

So as you say Spotlight web searches have to contact some sort of search engine, but I don't know of a legitimate reason why Apple should need to know about them as well.

This is (1) in Safari, and (2) with Spotlight Suggestions disabled. Spotlight and Safari should be able to get search engine results or suggestions from the search engine without needing to go through Apple. We can speculate on what Apple is doing with this data, but it certainly seems to violate the user's "right to privacy," if not more.

I'm not sure it's a contradiction either, more of an omission, he doesn't specifically address search data in that interview. However the comments are aimed squarely at Google so the PR message rings a bit hollow.

I don't find it surprising that they're collecting as much data as they can, it just seems odd to call out competitors who do similar things.