Are there any good resources which cover HDFS+Hive? I'd really love to see performance measurements but the entire premise of "Let's analyze ALL the data every single query, we'll just use a zillion workers!" has always came across to me as incredibly inefficient and computationally expensive.

I'd wager they query their data frequently and in a predictable manner, at which point using some sort data structure actually designed for fast searching (such as a simple btree in most rdbms) makes perfect sense here.

If the data is purely for archive purposes and is rarely queried or is queried in very random patterns that can't really make adequate usage of indices, then I'd agree with your suggestion.