Instead, Google now has to come up with a bunch of half baked social projects that are seen through the lens of search, which makes no sense to anyone outside of Google. Search is not a social endeavor unless you are a librarian and social has very little to do with search.
Google could have bought Sun, but most of what Sun did made no sense for Google while at the same time Google is doing a lot of the things Sun wanted to do, but could never execute. Sun made money on hardware, but that was a dead business. $7 billion just to own Java patents would have been great for Android, but as it stands Google will likely license them for a fraction of that.
In the end, Sun's big prize was Java and all the money in Java right now is in the enterprise software game. Google doesn't care about enabling enterprise software. Google doesn't care about enabling IBM and Oracle to write big software for big companies.
I think Google did the right thing by not buying Sun.