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What justifies a product management role separate from the developers? A PM that is also a developer understands better what is the cost of all these features.

Maybe a separate PM would see the forest better as he is not looking at specific trees, but there are a lot of people who can do both well.

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Don't know about Google. I'm working for a defense contractor, so we may have more hoops and red tape to blunder through... but my PMs are always busy talking to the customer, writing documentation, figuring out what the specs actually mean, managing, or something. There's no time left in the day to hunker down with the code (or digital logic or whatever engineering discipline the PM came from).

See also "Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Perhaps it depends on the industry, but in health IT I've yet to meet anyone who could perform both roles well. Developers mostly only make good PMs when the product is intended for either general consumers, or other developers.

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