I was under the impression that Google Fonts stripped hinting to speed download since its entirely ignored by many platform/browser combinations.

And for platforms that do use it I thought it ran ttfautohint to generate it, which sounds incredibly similar to what these guys do.

Relatedly, Google fonts also has sophisticated subsetting options which this page claims as an improvement over Google's offering.

edit: relevant links

http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/index.html

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QTX1lU97z08 (27 minutes in for stripping hints on non-windows requests)

http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/2011/04/streamline-your-w...