My friend Chris Maroulakos notes:

This is the cover of the remastered Abbey Road: http://www.albumartexchange.com/gallery/images/public/be/beatle-abbeyr_24.jpg. As you can see, it’s the same picture (bare feet and all) as on the classic album. The picture you have on your iPhone must be an outtake, not the actual cover.

Chris is indeed correct: the photograph I earlier identified as the cover of the 2009 Abbey Road stereo remaster is an outtake (a fact I discovered here, where I will forever go to solve all future Beatles-related mysteries), and I’m not sure how it ended up as the album of art for my digital copy of the record. Which, of course, just gives me another question to answer.

In the course of doing some research (which I suppose I could have done before writing the previous post), I stumbled upon two things:

This amazing website which claims in its masthead that “Paul McCartney was killed and replaced in 1966,” and which refers to the replicant McCartney as “Faul.”
This very weirdly-edited interview with David Letterman in which Paul (or Faul, Plastic Macca suggests) explains the whole story.

While I am grateful to Chris and Google to putting some of my questions to rest, I am left unsatisfied. The question of why I care so much about all of this has yet to be answered. Further self-analysis required.