Expedia, Orbitz, etc make money via nag screens and upsells. They have no incentive to make the experience positive or easy. Google seems to.
I'm convinced that for every DNS related change at 1&1 - there is a guy that manually makes the change.
Google Domains also looks promising but I'm waiting for them to not be in beta lest they decide to scrap the product. Google would win me over if they offered free SSL certificates. In fact I think they should go ahead and disrupt the SSL industry by doing that too. Nobody should have to pay for a silly cryptographic signature. That would disrupt NS and all the others who try to upsell stuff.
StartSSL already offers free SSL certificates - and they haven't disrupted the industry. Even if Google started offering free SSL certificates - it's only a band-aid to the problem not a solution.
After uploading your documents 30 times, them claiming they didn't get them, you would too.
Oh, and uploading them each time was pretty painful.
Mozilla is doing this very soon: see https://letsencrypt.org/