There is no "new" CFP function. A bunch of people just learned what it is the last couple of days since someone posted a leak claiming to have Found the Promised Land, which turned out to be the same thing everyone already had except for that one file.
Sort of. Since most people using Ghost are using it to restore to hard disks (well up until the recent popularity of SSDs), it's a little different since it is re-programming the flash memory on the device. The fact that it is writing an "image" rather than "a collection of files to an existing filesystem" is similiar to Ghost.
Because there are various places that hold data on the device, and the OS only occupies a couple of specific ones. In addition to those, there are places that only the carrier can generally write to, and places that only the manufacturer can write to. When you do an OS load, it only writes to (and/or erases) the places where the OS goes. A security wipe will erase (perhaps not completely erase, but return to default state) some other places that an OS load normally does not touch.
Your musing is correct.