You can say a lot of things about Google but they've got balls. :-)

The irony is even stronger than you realize, Google has been on a kick 'make the web fast' for a while, when they first kicked it off in 2010 I pointed out that most of my pageloads were hung waiting for doubleclick to load (which got fixed by the way, they are a lot faster now). So the notion of pushing a bunch of non-useful eye candy is kinda antithetical to that theme, but they do it anyway.

Perhaps their release process is broken, I have wondered what would change if they could make it a corporate priority that no Google generated page should take longer than 500mS to load on a 1Mbit connection. They could at least lead by showing best practices for fast loading web pages. Perhaps a current employee reading this will pass it along.