Re: table talk ethics
While I agree with you, I would add a caution. The talk itself may be ethical, but if it's intended to gain an unfair result, it's unethical. There are three possible objections a player in a multiway pot might make to a comment by someone else in the pot: collusion, communication of hand information and helping a player play.
The general assumption in Poker is that anything said by a player in the pot is part of the game, intended to maximize his profit, not to communicate information. If he's bad at table talk and actually giving information away, that's his own lookout and other players are entitled to take full advantage. If it happens to work against you, say when you have the best hand and a clumsy table-talker gives away that he holds the second-best hand and induces other players to fold, that's the luck of the game.
But it's easy to cross the line without noticing, and it's even easier to make someone else mad by seeming to cross the line. If that's not your strategy, you should be careful. The most common fight I see is not about collusion or giving away your hand, but in helping someone else play: "watch out, he could have a straight" or "boy, he limped in preflop but now he's raising like crazy." It's true that information is out there for everyone to see, but not everyone sees it.
If you're not in the hand, you should never say anything that might affect the play in any way.
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