"A lot of people are pissed because they didn't get in and feel it's google's fault for having a 'broken interview process'."
I agree with much of what you said, though I don't agree with this particular sentence. I'm always pause a little when someone supplies an unflattering ulterior reason for a criticism ("oh, they're just pissed that they didn't get in"), since there may in fact be reasonable criticisms of google's interviewing process that shouldn't be dismissed so casually.
However, as someone who went through it recently (software engineer position, didn't get an offer), I agree with you that it is straightforward, no gotchas or gimmicks. I'd say that at least in my case, if you review data structures and algorithms, and are prepared to use them creatively to answer middle-to-difficult style questions from "cracking the coding interview" (not the exact questions, of course, but at that level of difficulty), at a whiteboard, in 45 minutes, without too much help, then yes, you're prepped. I'm not saying you'll pass the exams, I'm just saying you won't be surprised (again, just in my own experience, for a SE position).
The only thing I was "surprised" with is just how much progress you really are expected to make on these problems and the level of accuracy you are expected to show in your coding. I gave myself three weeks to prepare. I should have taken 3 months, maybe more. No, every parenthesis or semicolon doesn't need to be placed correctly, but (again, my impression here) you pretty much do need to be writing code (probably in Java or C++) that will compile and run with minor edits, and you need to largely solve the problem, at a whiteboard, in 45 minutes. If you get stumped a bit and need a prompt, I don't think that'll rule you out, but if you need too much help getting through, my guess (based on limited experience) is that this will be a no-hire.
Fair enough. I think there's room for reasonable disagreement about whether this sort of thing produces too high a "false negative" rate, but I suppose that's up to Google. Good software developers are hard to find, and while false negatives do cost you, false positives cost you too. I'd generally say this is google's business, they can afford to be picky, as you said.
With one difference… which is that Silicon valley companies almost uniformly insist that there is a severe shortage of software engineers, yet at the same time insist on being (this may just be my own opinion), extremely picky about who they hire. Should an industry that by its own admission tolerates an exceptionally high false negative rate be taken seriously when it says it has trouble attracting enough talent?