No matter the variance, if you play enough games you will essentially eliminate the luck factor. No doubt to do so in a turbo takes more games than a regular tourney, but it doesn't matter how much luck is involved, as long as there is an element of skill, and you think you are better than the average opponent (to the point that you can beat the rake as well), then they can be profitable. Also, you can play more turbos, thus maximizing your profit if you truly are a winning player. Higher profit, but also higher variance per unit of time.
Now on to strategy, I don't particularly care for the tournament format, I'll do some for fun once in a while, but I do much better at cash games. There was a brief stint where I played the stars $3+$0.40 single table turbos a lot. I'd play 4 at a time and they'd usually take about an hour. I would play extremely tight for the first couple rounds, because everyone else is playing loose. The time you pick up QQ+ and AK, you most of the time get paid off. Sometimes you're flipping a coin with AK, but when a double up almost guarantees you finishing in the money (3/10 money), I've found it to be a profitable play EARLY ON.
As you get closer to the money (final 4-6) you can loosen up a bit. If you haven't won any pots, you HAVE to play more hands, or else you bust out soon, or if you have enough chips to play with, try to steal some pots and build on your chip lead. If you are the big stack this is not the time to go crazy with AK or low pocket pairs hoping for a coin flip (unless their stack is small relative to yours and you can try to knock them out without killing your stack if you do lose). Use position to your advantage and steal some blinds, they are getting quite large now. As the blinds get big relative to stack sizes, you have to adjust your play accordingly. Be extremely aggressive, but don't play stupid. You don't want to lose your stack with a marginal hand against a monster. Once you get to the final 3-4, you can sometimes sit back and let the chip leader take down the people below you, and if you're the chip leader you should be doing a lot of stealing. Just know that as the last place person's stack dwindles down they'll call with more and more (as should you if you're small stack) so don't try to bully a small stack unless you have at least something decent. Just because he shoves to your raise doesn't make it an automatic fold, because his range has widened as well.
I play these to money first of all, because that is actually the biggest increase (4th to 3rd) in payout. Once in 3rd play for 2nd and heads up you obviously try to win. Now I'm not saying you're not trying to win the entire time, but I don't like calling a coin flip when you're 2nd in chips with 4 people left against the chip leader because if you didn't win this you'd have almost no chance at 1st.
That's just the way I played them, and I've played nowhere near enough to consider my results over the long run, but this worked decently well for me in the short amount of time I played and think that if I could deal with the swings that I could make a profit in them, although I still think cash games are more profitable. But hey, that's just me.