Goldfinger, I am under the impression that the count your entire domain. IE, even if you have a gambling mini-site you will be counted as a gambling site. I believe I read something that said for US affiliates, they could not use adwords to get traffic to a site that pointed any links outward to a place where a bet could be made. I would think they used the same site wide philosophy for adsense as well.
As for ranking and indexing. I have heard both. I did however have an SEO once remind me that Google must fall under the regulations of the FTC and so they must separate their ad revenue from business operations. There are multiple Google spiders, so the one that crawls your site to determine what ads to put on is not the same one that will index you. Do they talk? Who knows.
I guess if you think its working and it doesn’t kill your usability, there is no harm. Personally though, I think adsense looks like crap and pays about the same so I don’t use it anywhere.