Most of this is out of the scope of this tutorial, but is in the comprehensive one.

match is an expression, but let is a statement. In the first example, the match expression is used inside of the let statement, in order to produce what is assigned.

I'm not 100% sure if you _must_ take that reference, but given that it's a pointer, that makes sense. In the previous version, it's simply returning a value, but println! needs the contents, not the pointer itself.

Inside the linked Option enum, it shows both: http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/option/enum.Optio...

It's an enum like any other.

That said, these are all good points, and this documentation should be improved. Thanks, I'll add this to my list.