...What's his point? When Google is down he can't access his Google apps. If these were all desktop apps, they would be unusable when his computer was dead.
To non-geeks, a dead laptop 'owns them', in the sense that they are powerless against it, as much as Google owns Gmail users.
But he is geek. He is owned by a lack of control, not a lack of knowledge. Everything is so interlinked on this kind of web services that even if he did back-ups, he would still be helpless without the access to his social network.