I think your friend made an error when referring to SEW instead of Google to determine what G will or will not do when it encounters a no-follow. In
Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam it reads,
"From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results."
It doesn't say anything about not following the link, and never has ... it is
just about not passing
PR.
The anchor text is an interesting note, though ... but for a non-competitive term, it is not unreasonable that the page would be returned.
That's what I think ... MJ