Yup which at the moment would take 4 people(The heads of the 4 biggest pools). 4 people with no real reason for it being them except that they run successful pools. Hows that for centralization?
Pools are in fact very democratic systems for this reason. Users can change pool at any moment's notice.
Miners still have to obey the rules of the Bitcoin nodes. If a miner tried to generate more coins, even if 100% of miners tried, it would fail as the several thousand active Bitcoin nodes would simply reject the blocks.
Softforks cannot add more coins into the network, they can, at most, restrict earlier valid transactions.
It's always been known that someone with over 51% of the power can rewrite the blockchain, but only within the rules of the Bitcoin nodes.
For example, a softfork could never spend coins from your wallet without your key, it could never make more coins or delete a users balance.
This is a good post on the difference: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/30817/what-is-a-s...
51% certainly gives someone a lot of power, but it's power with limits, and the limits are the rules coded into every Bitcoin node.