gvot - I have had the same issue:
A real world example where the length of soil anchors required to resist uplift forces on a spread footing was to be determined by a geotechnical engineer. These soil anchors were to be extended below the footing to form a "breakout" cone of soil whose dead weight was adequate to resist the applied uplift. The service dead load on the footing was 7,000kips. The service wind uplift on this same footing was 6,500 kips, so in reality there was no net uplift. But, using 0.6D+W we provided the goetechnical engineer with a net uplift load of 2,300 kips. The geotechnical engineer then insisted on using a safety factor of 3.0 for the soil uplift requirements, and therefore provided anchors long enough to mobilize 6,900 kips of soil. The 6,900 kip resistance was now greater than the original wind uplift not including dead load at all - on a footing that had zero nominal uplift!?!?!?
I think that the above is ridiculous, and I think that the S.F. on the soil anchors in this case and the piling in your case could be reduced somewhat based on engineering judgement when using the 0.6D load combination to recognize the safety factor built into that equation, but that is just my opinion...