the argument about if it sound the same it should play the same can be kinda flawed. things like comparsons between mp3 and flac or 16bit 44.1khz wav, i know that there are a lot of people who cant tell the differnec between a 320kb/s mp3 and a 16bit 44.1 wav but i know there is a lot of people like me that can hear the difference and all of the artifacts that mp3's leave in the high end.
Part of the reason I tried to reason my way through that was because I got the sense that what one would intuitively expect here probably isn't what will truly happen when playing the same song at different bitrates. I'm amazed that some humans seem to have the skill to discern between different types of encoding by ear - this is what tells me I'm not a true audiophile. Either I've got some hearing loss due to fallout from the loudness war, or it's just something I wasn't born with.
Anyway, if there are discernible differences to the human ear, then a computer will definitely see the waveforms as different. What's interesting to me is how much of a difference this would make in the formation of the track and the traffic on it. I guess the only way to tell is to experiment with the same song, encoded at different rates or in different audio formats, and see if there's any obvious difference (such as a different value for traffic or a differently-shaped curve), or any noticeable difference in how the track plays and its scoring potential.
