The problem is that there's nothing unambiguously non-typographic about the design. If they had distorted the symbols so much that they were outside the realm o

The problem is that there's nothing unambiguously non-typographic about the design. If they had distorted the symbols so much that they were outside the realm of normal unicode characters, sure. But anyone with that font could reconstruct the logo. Stuff like this works when the glyphs are recognizable enough, but when the design is such that you simultaneously know that it is not to be interpreted literally. It fails here because the latter isn't clear. So in this case it is typography. That's the problem.