Now I certainly know of Page's tenure as an in-demand session player, even at the tender age of 17. However, saying that he was responsible for many or even some of Townsend's recorded licks.............sorry; don't buy it. I'd have to see far more evidence to believe that. Townsend happens to be one hell of a guitarist (even if his lead chops are wanting).
Well, I'm just recounting what I read in a biography of Led Zeppelin. You might be drawing the wrong conclusions, too. Just because Pete Townsend couldn't get the hang of an electric guitar rift on a single cut in 1964, doesn't mean that he's a bad guitar player, or that he's some kind of a fraud. It just means that the electric guitars of the period were damn hard to master -- especially for a relatively young kid who could barely afford one a year prior.
Some of the stuff you regularly see done on a modern electric guitar would have been impossible on the ones constructed in the early '60's. The strings are lighter, the amps are more powerful and so on.
The big guns of that period were Eric Clapton (who was only around 15 when he burst onto the scene), Jeff Beck (another 'Yardbird'), Jimmy Paige (who was still unknown except to music insiders), and that's getting to be about it. You might throw George Harrison into that mix. The bench strength just wasn't there.
Why do you think all of these guys were so ga-ga over Jimi Hendrix when he arrived on the scene? Hendrix could do things then that are still hard to do now.
I believe it was Page who played on a number of early Kinks recordings (I can't think of any early Who track that has anything that sounds like what Page would have played.).