Capitalization when in quotes makes a difference?

[bcc1234]

When did this start to happen?

For some queries, I see 10x difference in the reported number of results.

Queries like that: "Nice Widgets" vs. "nice widgets"

I thought Google didn't take capitalization into account.

[tedster]

Google always said that, but we have many reports that in recent weeks, capitalization makes a difference - even without using quotes:

Different ranking when using capital letters [webmasterworld.com]