Don't table tennis players learn to predict how the ball will act based on their opponents movements? Seems like if they aren't able to do that with a robot opponent (who doesn't look or behave like a human) then they wouldn't be able to play at their best.
That's not true. If you read the article Kojima even said he wanted to make a zombie style MGS game and pitched a zombie game based on nano bots before the development of MGSV.
Niantic Labs became independent from Google during the forming of Alphabet so it is to say you are still giving an independent third party access to your google account.