That isn’t a misprint. By that point, Decipher had pretty much said that they hated allies as they were pretty much broken the way they were originally designed (pay once for a hard to get rid of permanent that could be a chump in a skirmish if you so decided). Having the Gondorian Merchant on the TT site path meant that he could never be chumped to a huge minion at his home site (especially early on when it would normally really hurt a fellowship). This was their first real attempt at limiting allies. If you notice, all four allies in Return of the King have home sites on the Towers path meaning that they will never be able to skirmish unless there is some card that allows them to.

Yes. The misprinted Saruman’s Chill are tournament legal. A clarification was issued (and is now in the Comprehensive rules book) stating that some copies were misprinted and they all cost 1 twilight.