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There are plenty of other ways to get that information. Statistics (x number sold * y average casts per user), asking streaming companies (i'm sure netflix and hulu know when you're on a chromecast and could report rough numbers to google), and i'm pretty sure there are other ways that I'm not thinking of.

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Nope. As others have pointed out, every cast has to begin with a call to google.com (which is why chromecast must be connected to the internet). The call basically sends an id number to google, and then google returns a URL of where to get the code for that cast.

... and how would they know "average casts per user"?

You don't, but that's what the entire field of statistics was invented for to estimate :)

From the above, though, it sounds like that's not necessary since it's fundamental to the cast protocol.

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