I'm kicking myself for not getting more verbose output logged when I had the thing in my hands. I did a successful read, and it appears that they hook the firmware EEPROM straight to the southbridge instead of going thru an EC for the Mini :-)
Here is a the read output I captured:
flashrom v0.9.0-r631
No coreboot table found.
Found chipset "Intel ICH7M", enabling flash write... WARNING: SPI Configuration Lockdown activated.
OK.
Calibrating delay loop... OK.
Found chip "Macronix MX25L8005" (1024 KB) at physical address 0xfff00000.
Reading flash... done.
--
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.