They switch the the biggest machine IBM can give them every few month.
Yea, almost all this "web scale" scalability can achieve those numbers because they can partition, relax transactional requirements, and scale out. For system-wide true transactions, scaling up is still the only option, it seems.
Although, H-Store/VoltDB claims some impressive numbers if your OLTP app fits the requirements.
I'd suspect that if those don't qualify as 'very large scale' to your definition (which would be entirely justifiable) that such systems don't exist because they're not currently possible. For example I don't think it's possible to implement Facebook with SERIALIZABLE no matter how much money you throw at the problem.
(I'd love to be proven wrong of course)
Normally, whenever physical objects or money is involved, transactions should be considered.