My understanding is that Gemini OCR is now considered state of the art and a material step forward in OCR accuracy
Is this from the article that was on the front page a few days ago? If so, it's not true. The title was intentionally misleading, they said they're the best, but if you read the article it was that they're actually the best in some subproblem, not the actual thing.
Yes. It’s still just an LLM and that means it can alter the meaning of entire passages in ways that are difficult to detect. This technology absolutely should not be used for OCR in domains where correctness matters.