IE8 does that icon thingy as well, think they call them accelerators.
Bing refering to Google is probably to avoid more lawsuits. They allready got fined just for including IE as default browser. Can't have them set a MS search engine as defalut too, and not make it easy to use the competition. They kinda do this with Live, but noone takes that serious, right?
I use blank page for home. Even faster
and can do Google search from top-right box. Think they tacked that on with IE7.