What is the Future? Ranking Content or Pitch Pages in SERPS?

I have several things to ask and to say to everyone.

I currently have a site that sells a quick-fix product with virtually 0 back end. I make a ton of money selling it. But its a pitch page that ranks in the search engines, #1 ranking for all the terms in the niche. And I have virtually no competition.

It, along with my other products, are not products in which generating a list works well, because they are mainly products that are very critical to a person in a point of time. So they are for the desperate, time-restricted prospect.

So I've decided that ranking sales pitches is the best method for these style of products.

However, I've recently invested about 10k to get 5 sites ranking #2 or #1 in Google. I paid one of the most reputable guys on Elance, and he will not take my funds until my sites rank. The cash is chilling in escrow on Elance.

But these future 5 sites that I want to rank are more products where I could capture emails and try to email them several times. I've never marketed that way so this will be a new thing for me.

As much as you hear marketers say "the money is in the list" i still feel its mainly for IM people or niches in which there is huge PASSION. It doesn't work in desperate need niches as well..

ANYWAY -- enough babbling. Here is my deal: I am concerned that the search engines are going to try harder and harder in the future to ELIMINATE cheesy long-form sales pitches. Now, dont get me wrong, in BUYING niches (Example: Hotels), the search engines will get a collective consciousness of what the sites look like. But in niches such as "stop my balding", Google willl learn to hate the long form sales pages and rank content sites. I mean, I am sure they already do this but I feel they will further penalize long-form pages soon.

So I am thinking that in my niches (niches in which where there is less of a time-restraint in the buying process),I will provide CONTENT that people LOVE ,and I will make the content "useful but incomplete" and then have links throughout the content which will either link to a sales pitch or to a squeeze page.

That way I will steal please google and users by providing quailty content instead of direct sales pitches.

However, I do feel that direct sales pitches might convert better...

Anyway, what do you guys think? DO you think its stupid to rank a sales pitch these days? And if I am ranking pitches, should I replace them with content?

I am also worried about the social element to it all. Should I allow comments? RSS Feeds? Like buttons? All that jazz? I really know nothing about it... I also fear Facebook will come out with a much less backlink dependant search engine soon. Thoughts?