Google brings something that no amount of fancy engineering and elegant solutions can provide: New Users. Because of that it is necessary to dance to their SEO tune.
Of course, now that they're gigantic, they now are the primary force that's adding unneeded engineering complexity to keep content in a format they can already read.
So who's really helping whom?
Offtopic, but Google's propensity to migrate anything popular to their own hosted content is a better example of this. They find ways to present the good stuff without the end user ever visiting your site. At some point, this starves off the sources.
Again ironically, this will put Google out of business if they keep it up, unless they can start to collect all that data on their own or otherwise incentivize content producers to allow them access.