Very funny anecdote. What bothers me though is that this implies that Google seems to think they own the web.

For example, they told the guy that he was lucky that they were willing to give him a backup, but it seems to me that Google's the one that should be taking responsibility for their actions.

Its a short jump from, "you have to use POST or we'll delete your stuff" to "you have to follow Google standard X or we won't index your site."

Welcome to the first web empire.