"There is a 100% chance that an enemy is within 1000 units of where we placed him." That's what it means. Every time.
There's a danger in having your zoom level adjusted that high - for example, take the following phrase:
"There is a 100% chance that an enemy champion might be between 0 and 100% health."
While this statement is true, every time - it doesn't mean it gives you anything resembling perfect information.
While there's a certain degree of ambiguity of interpretation in an ally ping - information quality is more than just how you can interpret it at one level. If you zoom in too far - you can make the claim that every bit of information is perfect --> 'There is an 100% chance that an ally pinged the map at that spot when you see the ally ping the map at that spot.'
This is why if you want to assess the quality of information - you figure out where it maps to a decision tree of sorts - given information X - how likely is it that action Y is completely correct? While many people here have expressed the sentiment that a motion sensor would mean that the act of avoiding ganks is trivial - I'm not actually sure that's the case - given how the jungler could effectively stall you out just by passing by a fairly wide region of the map - hence the decision tree is still fairly fuzzy.
With the addition of the Mandrake ward the most basic punishment for not learning map awareness is somewhat sidestepped, and I don't agree with that.
I sympathize with you here. There's a basic level of disagreement that most people have - whether or not you need intrinsic punishments for failure - or whether or not a relative failure is enough to be a skill test.
Put another way:
vs.
There are varying schools of thought as to whether an explicit punishment is needed for failing a skill test versus simply letting the relative benefit be the punishment in and of itself. I'm not sure where I fall on this camp either.
If you think that looking at the mini-map is busy work and isn't a real skill then why not make an audible alert every time an enemy comes into vision of a regular ward as well? You can apply all of the same reasoning to do that as you have to justify the Mandrake ward.
I'm not sure I can with good conscience. Perfect Vision provides multiple dimensions of information to the user - direction, current enemy health, current enemy champion - etc.
Therefore - when do you ping? When the enemy jungler is passing by? When he's heading towards you? Do you have a different ping for when he's gankable? Or there are two? By saying that by sanctioning one form of alert - you should sanction another form of alert with similar context - opens a similar argument where the sight ward should have lots of differing ping types based on what you're seeing - 'low health jungler here', etc.
I won't try to convince you further. Your mind seems pretty made up about this issue.
To be frank, I'm fairly certain this iteration of Mandrake isn't unique enough to be justifiable to have in the game at all. It doesn't have a breadth of use that I'd like a mini-tool to be and a Sight Ward is strictly superior.
The only reason why I'm fascinated in this iteration specifically is that I'm trying to figure out how to support proper 'bluffing' in the game as it feels like in the current game - with Sight Wards / Perfect Vision being the norm - there are very little plays you can do, especially at higher tiers of play because the opponent can evaluate your precise strength at any given time.
It's reducing the evaluation of your opponents state to having this network of perfect information nodes up or down - rather than having to infer your pattern and behavior and benefiting from that.