Of course Google is not that dumb. If you don't put quotes in then it will return results that have any of the terms. They do this because they are an advertising company and so it is better to have lots of SRPs returned than none.
If you search Google with a quoted string, you will receive only results with a string of those words, in the order specified.
However, if you do not quote the string, Google still searches for all non-common words, but they can be distributed variously around the document. Thus, the white space between search terms can be considered to be an 'and' construct.
the white space between search terms can be considered to be an 'and' construct
No it can't.
Google used to support + prefix on search terms to ensure they appeared on the pages in the results, but that was removed because of Google Plus. Now, to ensure that your query returns results that contain all the words searched for, you need to quote them individually.
The estimate without quotes for "PS4 blue light of death" is 34M. For "Xbox One blue light of death" is 2.7M.
Although requesting the highest page (990) shows ~288 pages, so estimates are probably not that accurate.