Matt Cutts answered another question from AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old in this new Webmaster Video from Google.
The short answer is yes, the two status codes are treated slightly different by Google's crawlers. A 410 is understood to be a permanent status code, used to signal the page is never coming back. A 404 is treated as potentially short-term, which can happen from a variety of errors and issues. So if a webmaster goes to the effort of passing along a 410 status code as opposed to a 404, Google will assume the page is dead.
However, Cutts made a point to mention that Google's crawlers have to be both prolific and consistent in their crawl of the web in order to keep everything properly indexed - many webmasters run into issues, and so plenty of redundancy is built into the crawlers themselves. So, even if your page is returning a 410, Google's crawlers will eventually be back.
To check out the last question AJ Kohn asked regarding Google's determination of popularity versus authority, head on over to our analysis.
