The company I worked for was the same, But it's a curse though. Always got the feeling of being looked down on for not running that gauntlet. If you're being assimilated into the Mountain View Googleplex -- fine, it's so massive nobody will care or notice. But being borged into a small site everyone will know and there were snotty people who openly grumbled about it.

Soooo much of the Ego of Google engineering -- at least in the past -- is built around their sense of superiority of having made it through that interview and being selected as one of the "best engineers in the world."

Gave me heightened impostor syndrome for 10 years.

I think one is better off getting the interview.