Can a bitcoin transaction be reversed from the receiving end? I know this seems like a duplicate of the question 'Can a bitcoin transaction be reversed?' but none of the answers there were explicit enough as they all seemed to assume reversal triggered from the sending side. 

I guess a secondary part of my question is 'What would happen if a merchant just sent the funds back to any one of the input addresses that was used in the original transaction?' Would the  money be effectively returned to my control?
When sending coins, the original Bitcoin client picks the more "secure" coins, i.e. the oldest ones that can be used as input for the transaction. Internally, it doesn't care about accounts, although it does of course keep track of each account's balance.

As a result, sending coins back to an input address will only guarantee they will go back to the original wallet, not necessarily the original account, let alone the original person. In many situations wallets are shared between different persons, e.g. in web services (online wallets, mining pools, etc.), so the difference is crucial.

Thus if you're designing an application and you want to allow refund, you should absolutely not rely on the sending address in your application design. Instead, allow people to give an email, a refund address, etc. at some point.

We're talking about the original Bitcoin client here. Although this behaviour is largely justified for security reasons, some current or future clients may not mix addresses between accounts and still be compliant at protocol level.