I’ve read this, too. Cats leave you gifts not because they’re being particularly friendly, but because they regard you as an incompetent hunter. You see the behavior in indoor-only cats as well though, say, leaving toys on your pillow, etc. In that case, I wonder if they’re reciprocating? You feed me, I feed you (kind of).
The gift-bringing behavior of domestic cats is not well understood. The "incompetent hunter" hypothesis is, well, just a hypothesis. I don't think any particular assumption of ineptitude is required on the cats' part; Occam's razor says that they're simply doing what they think is their part in keeping their family unit well-fed.
We've had more than one cat that absolutely loved playing fetch. When my wife figured out how to toss a bouncy toy from the bedroom and two rebounds to get it down the stairs to the first floor landing, it was game on for Gabriel...
And I've had a fine afternoon tossing a rubber ball that would bounce all around the living and dining room in billiard-style angles, and have an hour or more of lazy returns and rethrows.
