Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer[citation needed], the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
What's more, none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view, what's interesting are just the product ideas.
For all the hullabaloo, Director isn't that high at Google. He's not being hired as a VP (there are hundreds of those) or Google Fellow. It's not a bad gig, and I'm sure he'll get to work on interesting stuff, but I would have imagined a guy of his caliber getting more.
It's the "first" part that somewhat matters more and then it become's a question of whether he's more Edison or Tesla ( crazy marketing or crazy smart).
Also he's been put into a Director role, so his technical merits come second to his ability to find, understand, and cultivate the smart people needed for his department's goals.
Basic search term aggregation was illuminating. If Ray K. can go another step beyond statistical analysis, the results could be fascinating... or it could just be "People aren't wearing enough hats" of a let down.
edit: identities, not impressions
Your statement is like saying calculus isn't an impressive mathematical achievement because any moderately competent math major in college could recreate it.
Also, yes, those things existed, but there was no solution available that was so affordable and reasonable for personal use.
Well, not now.