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I think they want to push rich snippets this way. They show everybody how easy it is to use them to inflate your SERP CTR and when everybody starts using them to outmatch the competition they will clamp down on the overt abuse. Until then the market adoption goals are met.
You have a point. I think the same thing is happening with the authorship markup, just to bait bloggers to use the rel="author" tag to have them on board with the Google+ platform. Though the difference and the saddest part with them allowing rich snippet spamming, is that it's returning crap results to their users/searchers and encouraging them to be enticed by these fake reviews/ratings.
Until they can machine learn from the reports, this is going to be self community policing in the same way twitter spam is. Unless the community of SEOs report abuse they can't legitimately complain about this. Use the Google tool: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/request.py?contact_type=rich_snippets_spam
This is getting ridiculous yes, any Wordpress blog with GD Star Rating installed get review snippets without even reviewing a product.
...Martijn (according to that plugins WP download stats on the repository) is 843,589 downloads. That's a lot of stars.