From the perspective of a search engine's end user, Google should find those product pages and set them at the top of the results whether Panasonic's SEO is good or not, otherwise I'm going to switch to a search engine that can figure that stuff out.

The onus is on the search engine to produce good results, because they're the one providing the service. Hell, that's why I started using Google around 2000, they had the best first page search results.