<< What’s a bit confusing (and possibly an error on Google’s part) is that clicking on distinct news headlines won’t take you to the actual article, but yet another set of search results from the Google News Archive... you then need to locate the headline again and click it (and in some cases, pay to get the actual full content).>>

You're a bit wrong here. Goog sends you to a search result page where the first result is the article you've clicked on. I think they did that because many results are subscription-based.

I think it's bad usability to not have a consistent behavior when clicking on article headlines (at one time, it will take you to a search result, and at another time, it will take you to the article). So that's why I said this may or may not be an error, but it's confusing...