You're not allowed to have any images beside your ads, even if they're not aligned properly with your adsense links.
You can easily get away with such thing. Google is not very strict with this. I see many websites since the announcement that didn't change the layout and are still getting paid. But then, it is always better to be safe than sorry. Peace,
The TOS says "May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks, May not place misleading images alongside individual ads". This confuses a lot of webmasters and in some cases like azizny said you can get away with it but I advise to stay away from putting images of any kind near your ads to be on the safe side.
Without a clear definition about what is considered misleading, the rule is pretty ambiguous. That's probably why so many people get away with it. But like lifuchi said - better safe than sorry...
I think that's more due to the fact that the site in question didn't read the TOS update, or that Google hasn't checked it out yet. Similarly, there are a lot of sites using autotranslators to translate their sites into languages which you can't display Google AdSense on, such as Arabic.