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To clarify, so Google can distribute a binary that has been tampered with, but it'd be trivial to prove that they had in fact done that?

That's correct. Android will warn you if the signatures don't match too. Even if we're in the full-on conspiracy theory territory of Google disabling that core security feature, impersonating a third-party developer, and dropping a binary onto a single user's phone, they still couldn't fake the signature.

They could simply disable the warning. It's android giving the warning, not the app.

Unless you have a phone still vuln to the Android signature bug, which is millions of devices still running unpatched carrier builds.

But they own the OS, so I guess they can intercept whatever they want before it even reaches the app.

Though don't they control the code that does the signature checking?