That’s why (non-US) soccer gets it right, and has the league champ decided over the course of a season, and not via a playoff. Can you imagine Chelsea with 100+ points losing to Aston Villa via penalty kicks if there was a playoff? How unfair would that be? Which reminds me, why don’t the big finals remove the penalty kick system? I understand you don’t want 6 hour matches in a prelim round, but for the FA, Euro or World Cup final, you gotta play until someone gets more goals. Last year’s Euro final is the perfect example Liverpool comes down from 3-0 to tie, but wins on penalty kicks. It’s like settling a tie basketball game with a free throw shooting contest.
We used to have replays for our cup finals not all that long ago. If the game finished all square they would have to do the whole thing again the following week. Like lots of other things, penalties are a compromise solution.
I think these days most folk want to see a resolution of a match on the day. Very often extra time becomes two teams trying not to lose rather than two teams trying to win, and as a consequence becomes boring.
At least, an element of skill is involved, rather than, say, a toss of the coin, another solution tried on occasions here.
I’m not a fan of penalties though, and would rather see a straight win, although I was happy to see Liverpool win the Champion’s League that way. 
On the topic though, I, like most others, think the US is overated on the FIFA rankings, but I’m sure if they put their mind to it in the fullness of time they would be a genuine top 5 team.
(sorry about all those commas,! but I’m too tired to restructure my post)
You really shouldn’t infer anything at all from friendlies or exhibition matches. Even individual results in competitive matches such as World Cup games should not be considered in isolation - e.g. in the 2002 World Cup Finals, the US beat fancied Portugal in fine style, but were later outplayed by middleweights Poland, in a game that the US could not safely lose. Were the US better than Portugal, or worse than Poland?
The only real way to compare teams in soccer is to have them participate in a sizeable league. Since that is never going to happen between US and European teams, all we have is our guesses as to the relative standards of the leagues. From what I’ve seen, my impression is that MLS teams are at about the level of England’s third to fifth tiers (Leagues One/Two and the Conference). They would struggle in the second tier, the Championship.
Replaying drawn matches in the knockout stages of the World Cup or European championship would simply not be possible, for both the logistics of venues (and the host city coping with the influx of fans etc.), and also because the next match for the winner is often only a few days away. In a wider situation, there’s already concern from top clubs about the strain on their players from the sheer number of matches they play…unexpected extra fixtures, or indefinite extra time, would be a big problem.
A penalty competition is an excellent test of technique, nerve and background research. Scoring a penalty against a half-decent amateur keeper in front of a few tens of people is difficult enough - against top class keepers who know your penalty history in a deafening crucible you either have to find the corners hard, try some balls-of-steel cheeky feint or just thump it and hope, and a first-two-methods team will beat a third-method team at least 80% of the time IMO.
The problem with these “eventual goals from open play” is that due to the sheer exhaustion of both teams, they often involve far more luck than skill - much more so than penalties.
Spain often gets ranked highly, but they regualarly lose out to far less glamorous but workmanlike teams, Netherlands also has a habit of this.
A lot of the teams ranked lower down, such as Belgium and Poland, are almost certain to pull out shock wins, they just can’t keep it together for the full tournament.
There are plenty of websites that have a statistical guess at the best teams in Europe
http://www.eurofootballleague.com/
This one also factors in how good a team is in European terms by looking at the quality of the other teams in their home nations league, so that a domestic team playing week in and week out, has a far harder time of it if the best teams in their league are constantly having to play the European Champions and other highly placed teams in Euro competition.
Its easier to do this in Europe since there are a large number of teams that play in Europewide competitions.
It is done on a worldwide basis, but I can’t imagine its really all that credible.
http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/3412562
I do not understand how the UEFA ratings are so differant to the FIFA ones
http://europeancups.altervista.org/rankings/UEFA%20national%20team%20coefficients%202006.htm
Personally, I feel that neither are all that accurate.
Greece are rather far down there for having last won the European championship, but I guess not qualifying for the WC will do that to you.