Google was Fortune Magazine's #1 best place to work for six years in a row. The reason you occasionally hear a story about how Google isn't perfect to work at is because those are news. In general, it's a fantastic workplace.
I grew up in a tiny midwest town and I love it here. I would not enjoy living on either one of the coasts.
Many of my classmates in college couldn't wait to get out of the midwest. I have friends at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other large names in the tech industry, but more often than not, when I hear them talk about their jobs, even when they are talking about them positively, I am glad I stayed in the midwest because that is what fits me the best.
However, I do enjoy living in Chicago, and that I do consider it a huge difference from the coasts.
I have lived in a lot of different places: (New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Southern California, Northern California (don't laugh re: me splitting those!) and briefly in Illinoism Connecticut and the Dominican Replublic. ) and find value in their differentness.
To be clear, I'll say again it's not like I hate the Valley, but the reality is that day-to-day life between my Valley coworkers and mine just isn't that different, but sure is more expensive. If you find a Silicon Valley job from a SV company in a remote office... and there are rather a lot of them, just not all in one place... there's not that much advantage left, unless you really love something about SV specifically, which is of course a totally reasonable and sensible thing.
Whereas my friends in Houston get to go to one conference a year (if that). But I totally agree if you want a house with land to raise kids personally I think it sucks to live here.
(I work for Google Seattle, but I grew up in Pittsburgh -- Seattle is definitely more my speed, but I do enjoy a trip home now and then)
But like I said, we're all very different.
working on a giant campus that's isolated from
the outside world
This is true of almost everyone, of course. Every year i read the incoming intern abstracts, and they all literally say the same thing "I really would like to work on <whatever really popular crazy project was in the news lately>". Literally all of them.
That said, often you can work on them if you are good enough at what you do.
(But yes, often you have to prove that first, either internally or externally)
I spent about half my time at Google working on mundane improvements to search - visual redesigns, feature unification, infrastructure improvements - and half working on crazy green-field projects. Most of the crazy stuff was eventually canceled, and the stuff that did launch (eg. Google Authorship) ended up being a lot more toned-down than we initially envisioned. Ultimately I think I learned more from the crazy projects, but it's a very different kind of learning, much more experiential than factual.
The other thing you learn when you actually succeed at a crazy new idea is that people build up a tolerance to them really quickly. The first time we did an interactive doodle on the home page (PacMan...actually technically that was the second, but it was the first people noticed), everybody went wild, it was in all the newspapers, and we calculated people spent 4.82 million hours playing it. Now when an interactive doodle comes out, most people don't even notice. Remember that Google Docs, GMail, etc. were revolutionary in their day; it's only because they've become successful that you don't want to work on them.
But it has other strengths.
Actually, I am indistinguishable from everybody else.