Googlebot's URL is dead - why a redirect and not 404?

[thetrasher]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Two 301 and one 200 later:

This page is no longer available.

[tedster]

I see the same thing:

[google.com...] [301]
>> [google.com...] [301]
>> [google.com...] [200 OK]

That final page does have a title element of "How Google crawls my site", but the page only contains a search box, and message that says "This page is no longer available. Please browse or search for your issue in our Help Center." Seems like it should be a custom 404 and not a 200.

There are also some links on the left and a list of recommended articles on the right. The first of those articles is "Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes, and serves the web." That's a bit more like what you would expect from the original googlebot url in the first place.

So what's up? Maybe a Help Pages update gone bad.