What is the relationship between Technorati tags and Google search results?

Bill Ives of the [tag]Portals and KM[/tag] blog did an interesting bit of analysis about how tagging with Technorati may or may not affect rankings in Google.

It's something I've been paying attention to as well. Recently I found this really nice WordPress plug in that makes it dead easy to tag content in Technorati. It's called '[tag]SimpleTags[/tag]' and it allows me to simply mark up the text I am writing inline and certain words will automagically become Technorati tags.