I disagree with removing the redirecting feature. I do see where you're coming from, however, and have an alternate idea that should resolve the concerns you presented.
First of all, to clarify, the whole point of the redirection feature is so that users who are looking for answers are redirected to an answer rather than to a question with no answers and no clear direction (to a new user) as to where an answer is:
They have to notice the duplicate link and understand that the answer they are looking for is likely behind that link. I don't think this is all that obvious to someone without experience with an SE site.
It appears your primary complaint is about how when you search Google for questions, you're directed to a question that doesn't contain any of the content that the Google search showed that it contains. I think this is a valid concern. However, your assertion that Stack Exchange is engaging in cloaking in violation of Google policy is incorrect. Stack Exchange does not have control over the time Google crawls its pages. The reason why you see the duplicate question in the Google search results but the target question when you follow the link is because the question was not yet closed at the time Google crawled it, and then it was later closed. At the time of the crawl, anyone following the link would see the same content as Google sees, making this not a violation. You can verify this by accessing the cached copy the next time this happens to you.
Also, yes, search engines do indeed add redirecting targets to their search results. I've often noticed that once a certain time has passed, Google will show the target in its results rather than the closed duplicate when using keywords for the latter - once it has had a chance to crawl the page a second time. One obvious example where you see this is for redirect pages on Wikipedia: the link shown will be that of the redirect page, but the title and description will be of the target, after some point once the redirect is in place.
To summarize, I do agree with your problem statement that the redirecting feature creates confusion with Google search results and more recently closed duplicates. However, I disagree with your solution to remove the redirecting, primarily because we want new and anonymous users to find answers on our site rather than being shown pages with no answers (they don't know their answer is behind another link). A better solution is to implement a message box when such a redirect takes place, which resolves both concerns, and it can contain a link back to the closed duplicate with ?noredirect=1 to stop the redirect so users can see the question that matches their Google results.
