Google give a special treatment for their special adsense publisher and made them Google adsense Elite Publisher. As an elite publisher Google allows you and help you to beautify your adsense ads so it will blended well on your site and with relevant content. This really helpful for the publisher to add adsense ad and not to scared their visitors. Check out these website ehow and digital inspiration. Therefor the key is really blend your ad with your content so it is really look like part of your content. I know some webmaster will encourage to do this because it looks like we are tricking or visitor. But actually if the ad is really relevant to with your content than I believe it's okay.
Well, no. The special blending options and ad sizes are available to special publishers. They are called premium publishers, not elite publishers.
You're neglecting to mention this is invite only when you've got more than 20M pageviews a month or google just loves you. So for the rest of us, its not even slightly useful information.