I'm surprised to read this. Google's products never seem to me to be the result of an obsessive focus on the user. Rather they seem to be the by-product of an elegant engineering concept, with the interface something of an afterthought.
I think they've taken people's attention seriously from day one.
I started using Google in 2001, after seeing it on the screen of another computer in an Internet Cafe. I was trying to search something, and Altavista was returning shit filled with all kinds of commercials.
Opened Google, typed my search query in that lovely text input, hit Enter, and WOW, the first 10 results were all relevant. And no commercials. I was so impressed that I instantly switched.
Even when they added commercials, they were marked as such, while being clean and non-intrusive (well, that changed in the meantime -- I find their search page a little cluttered with commercials nowadays).
The notable flops have been the ones that have been driven by an elegant engineering concept; in particular, one of the major differences between Wave and GMail is that Wave seemed to ask "What can we do, and how should we expose that to the user?" while GMail (pre-Labs) largely asked "What should we do, and how can we figure out how to implement that?"
UX is not something you can stitch on afterwards. Good UX is deeply ingrained in engineering and an omnipresent, pervasive focus of the team. I think that's what parent is referring to in regards to what Google is lacking.
But the fact is, most of the UIs do what you expect and get out of the way without making a bug fuss.