To me it looks google is slower in indexing pages and somewhat confused what to do. I mean it shows crap sites that has been updated several years ago in better positions than my PR4 site which has quality and unique content. I see also significant drop in amount of unique monthly visitors that it used to send to one of my site. I don't see any alert in google's webmaster tools and therefore I think this site is not penalized.
I think their latest updates are full of shit. They just use an excuse 'better user experience', I think they did shit on purpose. To make people use more adwords due to dropping in SERP's ...
I just checked, this very same site rank on Bing at #1-#10 positions for competitive keywords but after google's shit updates, positions are #40 or whatever crap positions from previous #10-20 positions.
It's sad that people don't use that much Bing/Yahoo, now google can make all of us their bitches ...