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Well, Google specifically said that if you were hit, it was because of a penalty. It also specifically said that one way you might recover is by removing spammy links. So, I guess Google's lying. What's unclear for many people is that there's a follow-on effect. Some sites hit by the penalty might also no longer pass link credit. So if you had credit from those sites, you might not rank as well, even though you weren't penalized. Unfortunately, Google's not made it easy for anyone to tell the difference. And that's also cause the negative SEO explanation to gain some ground, even though that's probably not the case that's hitting most people. The advice still seems to be that if you know you were involved in gaining spammy or poor quality links, you should try to clean those up as best you can. If you weren't, gaining new, high quality links makes sense, yep.
I'd say there's a lot of room for wiggling in the few words they've said publicly on the topic. I mostly like and agree with Ryan's advice. The "penalties" don't seem to be consistent enough to be true penalties (at least, not all of them) and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that link profiles of a certain variety (which are very common in the pro-active, SEO, link building world but very uncommon anywhere else) were devalued. I agree it's hard to know the difference between "actively penalized" to "links were devalued," but the negative SEO risk seems too high to me (and the examples of sites that were completely unfairly hit too low) to assume this is mostly penalties rather than devaluations.
That's a good point Danny. It is hard to tell if you're being penalized or if it's just the case that links that once counted aren't counting anymore. There's really on way to know unless it's the whole site being penalized in which case you can tell when you no longer show up for your brand name. I agree that if you control the spammy link networks you should by all means remove them. I was more or less targeting the webmasters who now think they can control who links to them and who doesn't. There's no point in worrying about that. It's kind of a waste of time. I think the points I wanted to emphasize were: 1.) It annoys me when people post about how to recover from a something on the same day it hits. 2.) there's a lot of people crying penalty who fall into the links no longer counting category 3.) stop and try to figure out why your rankings went down before you go claiming it's a penalty and taking drastic measures.
Hit submit too soon before I typed out #4, the main point: Even if it is a penalty, and you clean up all the links and file a reconsideration request - your rankings may not return. If you were ranking because of those spam links you cleaned up, then you successfully removed the penalty along with the previous reasons for your rank. So you'll have to go about getting more high quality links to replace those. (cue organ transplant analogy... it's not enough to just remove the bad organ. You're still going to need a liver.)
Sorry, what I've seen says there is a penalty under Penguin. Sites disappear for their own brand names. That's not a link devaluation problem. That's a penalty.
I think the point Ryan is making (and he can tell me if I'm wrong) is that too many seem to be running around and spending an inordinate amount of time trying to fix bad tactics instead of focusing on good ones. I'm seeing people spending time (without a penalty or GWT warning!) pruning their links. Whether that's because they did some sketchy stuff or if they're concerned about negative SEO is kind of immaterial. Doing so is simply chasing the algorithm and misses the real point.