I'm amazed at how staunchly biased you're approaching this. Not only does this article take the first leap of paranoia in stating that Google is doing this to sabotage competition, it goes further to say that somehow Google Analytics will be untouched. It is as if that last one was added just to satiate the author's anger:

"I don't know how they're gonna do it, but...but...they're bad...'cause they're gonna hurt competition, so they'll find some way of not hurting themselves, they have to!"

Besides, the hashmark is a standard of its own when it comes to Ajax applications. Google isn't doing anything suspiciously new with that.

And you think this was their intent? Not to provide a better/faster search experience for THEIR users, but to deprive you of referrer data you were used to?

Yes it's a side effect, but it's ridiculous to say that was the intent of the change.

So you believe that Google did this on purpose and it isn't a limitation of the browsers?