Interesting, I've always heard Google doesn't pay very well. Similar to game companies, they can take advantage of the fact people really want to work there and know candidates will accept lower pay because of it. I've heard that from several Google employees past and present. Perhaps things have changed?
I know that the reason I wanted to work at Google was to learn how to solve problems involving scale and massive parallelism. There really isn't anywhere else that can teach you that stuff as well.
I won't discuss my personal story as I'm not anonymous here.
For my friend everything was very sweet until he mentioned that taking the job would require his wife to drop hers resulting in an income loss and he was concerned about this. Maybe he wasn't very subtle about it, but the minute he told that to the recruiter everything went black (got a "thank you mail" the next morning).
That being said the recruitment experience was very nice and I got a lot of good interview questions out of it.