Thomas,
Any two GPIO pins can be used as "manual" slave select lines. My point was that when SSOE = 0 in the SPICR1 register, the SPI SS* pin is available as GPIO. As described in the Reference Manual, when SSOE = 1 the SS* pin will be automatically be asserted and de-asserted for each 8-bit transfer. For most slave devices, this is not compatible with the device's command structure. So, the automatic control of SS* is not useful for most slave devices. In fact even with a single slave device on the SPI bus, the SS* line would have to be controlled 'manually' for most slave devices.
Regards,
Gordon