Well, you are certainly correct about exploit having neutral/positive meanings. But either way its a complete red herring.
I still feel you're intentionally evading the point here. The salient point is about the intention of the laws and the morality of circumventing intention. Circumventing the intent of the (justly applied) rules of a system is decidedly negative. This is why hacking is wrong (not because its illegal... really, everyone please stop citing laws as if they are the ultimate arbiter of truth) and this is why tax avoidance is wrong.
Well, every person / company of considerable means practices "tax avoidance," which basically means legal structuring of activities in such a way that they produce fewer tax obligations.
For example, waiting over a year to sell stocks so you pay long term rather than short term capital gains.
This is contrasted by "tax evasion," which is the illegal version of the same thing.
I know you're going to say, what Google is doing here is obviously wrong, not the same thing at all; and you're right, but a court has to draw the line somewhere, and it's very, very difficult to do so. Google has a variety of extremely highly paid professionals telling them they are on the correct side of that line, and so does every other large company, which is why so many of them employ these strategies.
In fact, I wonder how much more "moral" they could get without incurring legal action from shareholders over not taking advantage of permissible methods of tax avoidance!
I still feel you're intentionally evading the point here. The salient point is about the intention of the laws and the morality of circumventing intention. Circumventing the intent of the (justly applied) rules of a system is decidedly negative. This is why hacking is wrong (not because its illegal... really, everyone please stop citing laws as if they are the ultimate arbiter of truth) and this is why tax avoidance is wrong.