They care about one thing only: Money.
Obviously this is more of a strategic retreat and nothing else. It’s also a very common tactic to push for something crass, pull back, wait a bit and repeat. Most commonly resistance gets weaker each time, because people are people.
Now if anyone thinks they made money with a retreat and won’t try again, because it’s obviously much more lucrative, which stone exactly are you living under?
You are 100% correct. Nothing is won till you make it impossible for Google to push forward or destroy their motivation for trying again later.
There is no system of precedence for rulings of lower courts in Germany, technically not even for higher courts (albeit there de facto is). That’s something you could find in the U.S. though.
The lower court fucked up and it got overruled. The only thing Sony could have done would have been to bring similar cases to the same lower level court again and again and hope they make the same wrong decision over and over. That’s about the closest thing to precedence they could have relied on. It probably would have worked for Sony though.