As grateful as I was to be able to actually play the games I received on Christmas, it is hard to find anything positive longer term with respect to paying off DDOS attacks (though I'm assuming that this more or less happens constantly away from public view).

They probably sold the vouchers and bought servers with them. Most of the relay IPs are coming from the Google cloud.

There are currently 3346 relays, not 3000. The number is just a coincidence.

Those are simply file hosting accounts, so there's ability to run something like a Tor node from them.

More likely is they're using the same botnet that was attacking PSN/XBL to run Tor relays.

No, they're all on Google Compute Engine. (Which means one person could very easily stop this cold…)