You're right in that every company seeks the holy grail of integrated software, but what's perhaps important here is not the end-user product, in this case. Google is providing an infrastructure and not a holistic product -- it's allowing people to BUILD on a new algorithm, protocol, and structure for the web. Much like the early World Wide Web lead to the break-through of linking and deep linking and what not, there's a whole new structure inherent to the wave. And it will be open source, unencumbered by patents, and people can run their own stuff (sound like the early days of the web?). I read this article on it that makes some pretty good points about where Google may be going. Isn't this a game changer for the Web 2.0 stuff that's come to be quite a bit of what the average person does online?

Well good thing we still had access to Twitter! ;-)

I was following the #googlefail channel I found from the InformationWeek story and found a link to some cool response time graphs from the outage.

There's also a really great Wired article with graphs from a Tier-1 provider showing the incredible drop in network traffic (by about 15Gbps) during the outage.