Strongest vs Longest chain and orphaned blocks
The "longest" chain is the one with the most work. A chain's work is equal to the expected number of hashes it would take for someone to replicate a chain of the same number of blocks and the exact same difficulty steps. So currently each block adds about 266 work to the chain because it takes on average ~266 hashes to solve a block with the current difficulty. Blocks with less difficulty add less work. (The current total chain work is around 280.) However, two blocks in the same difficulty period always add the same amount of work to the chain. A block with a lower hash is not considered better than one with a higher hash.

Satoshi didn't initially realize that choosing the correct chain by just counting blocks allows for some extremely easy attacks. Version 0.1 just counted blocks. That's why the paper just says "longest". The idea of "chain work" was added a little later.

Resolving orphans as you suggest might actually make orphans more likely because miners would be incentivized in some cases to try replacing the most recent block rather than extending it, especially right before a big difficulty adjustment or when the most recent block contains a lot of fees.

Orphaned blocks happen every now and then. Eligius reports around 2% orphaned blocks. They would indeed be much more common if the target time was 1 minute since blocks would be generated faster and there would therefore be more opportunity for conflicts between blocks.