Not to mention the peer referees who were supposed to review the manuscript before it was accepted for publication...

> Google Scholar is the most comprehensive index of scholarly articles in the world, period.

You can't possibly know that, as Google doesn't tell us exactly what's covered by GS.

> Not only are there no free alternatives, there are no alternatives at all.

Wrong. The Web of Knowledge and Scopus (commercial) and Scirus (free) are perfectly valid alternatives. Furthermore, a number of studies in various fields have shown that all of these tools, as well as GS, usually return a number of hits that were not found by the others (again, including GS). Therefore, they can always be seen as complementing each other.

What you cound argue, on another hand, is that GS offers the best quality/price ratio. I for one would accept that.