OK, that answers my question about what was going on with the Ben & Jerry’s joke…

More importantly, though, Bruce Banner’s wording is interesting: “He sent Loki.” One possible interpretation of what was going on in The Avengers was that Loki wanted to invade and rule Earth anyway, and Thanos offered to help him in exchange for the Tesseract. Bruce’s wording, if it’s deliberately chosen (rather than just being imprecise), suggests that instead, Thanos was the one who chose the target because Earth was where the Space Stone was. Incidentally, that’s consistent with my fanfictional account of how things went down…