It should come with a warning that its gonna peg a cpu on my macbook with firefox. Google is my homepage. I don't expect to lose half my battery by opening firefox and stepping away for 20 minutes.
I've tried gadgets like this many times (though nothing as cool as that buckyball) and it's been my experience every time. It's slow because it's just HTML and CSS.
But yeah, it is a little waste full for something like googles home page.