Shamus,

I think you're very intuitive with this.

I was thinking the same thing with the collapsed field attracting the north. Have you seen John's pics of the fields around the rotor.

Think maybe on this one that squeezing out in between each magnet is a "scalar south" field. All the souths facing inwards are repelling and have nowhere to go but out between the magnets. Not only that.... if you take two identical magnets and put north up and space them a bit apart, there is a south field coming out between the two.

There gets a point where the speed is such that as the north field is out and possibly hasn't collapsed yet, the south field is attracted to that

I suppose there are different ways to look at that but get a compass or other magnets and experiment with feeling the south coming between the magnets