So, three ogres: one an elite, one 'standard', and one minion. Sounds fine...until you ask how that 1-h.p. minion possibly managed to survive growing up in a colony of might-makes-right ogres, or how it's lasted this long without suffering the one little scratch or accident that would do the one point damage required to kill it, and so on.
More broadly, if the fiction works in a particular way when PCs are involved then it also has to work the same when the PCs are not around: the 1-hit-point minion has one hit point. Period. Without this the fictional setting and background becomes nothing more than internally-inconsistent - and thus worthless - garbage.
And in this I AM putting fiction first, because if the fiction doesn't work right then the whole game kinda falls apart.
This is confused and incoherent.
Having 1 hp is not part of the fiction. It's part of the mechanics. There are no "three ogres, one elite, one standard and one a minion". There's just three ogres, all equally tough. Much tougher than (say) a town guard. But not very tough compared to Sir Lancelot.
Mechnaically, we stat the ogre as a solo vs a group of low-heroic PCs: only together can these fresh heroes take down an ogre. We stat the ogre as a standard vs an upper-heroic PC (the MM even gives us the stats, which is handy). And when the ogre fights Sir Lancelot (a mid-paragon PC) we stat it as a minion.
If ogre 1 fights ogre 2, given that this is not an episode of gameplay, we don't stat anything. The GM can just decide what happens - or, if s/he doesn't care, can toss a coin.
This is a good point. For some, the secondary reality really matter and things like this are troublesome.
It's a terrible point which shows a complete misunderstanding of how the game works!
How the mechanics of the game work has no bearing on how the "second reality" works. Nothing stops a 4e GM writing whole tomes of ecologies of ogres. But statting an ogre as a minion says nothing about its ecology. Statting an ogre as a minion is a gameplay decision, giving effect to the already-established fiction that the PC is considerably tougher than the ogre.
Now if there is some RPGer out there who can't establish fiction independently of game stats they may find 4e hard to work with. But that's nothing to do with "secondary realities". JRRT wrote reams of secondary reality without needing game stats to help him!