The aroma and flavor of coffee degrades rapidly after roasting, whether you grind it or not. Grinding it accelerates the process, but you can easily get coffee in unground form, and the difference between ground and unground is visually obviously: a vendor can't sneak you ground coffee if you want unground.
How long ago beans were roasted isn't visually obvious.
No, again ;-). Its freshly roasted, freshly ground, AND freshly brewed (at the right parameters). That's the gist of it, but of course the quality of the greens before roasting, the roast quality, and grind consistency all come into play. Also don't forget to use good water.
In short: quality in, quality out. Any discrepancy of the above will lead to a sub-par result.
But freshly ground and freshly brewed is something you easily control as the consumer, which makes them taken for granted and irrelevant. The other parameters are the object of the coffee drinker's desperate search. :)
This is actually the single most determining factor for a good coffee.