I decided against using the JS version because I'm not that good in JS, but mostly because I saw warning everywhere that "results returned by the JS search API are not necessarily in the same order as if you searched through their web interface". Blew me away -- they're really returning things in a different order?
But now I'm questioning whether or not that's just because their rankings will change depending on who is searching -- locale, preferences, etc., will all affect rankings. I suppose the thing to do would be to build this with their JS Search API, and see if I can get consistent rank results (and cmp to hand searches).
But I'm with you -- feels like this should be a tool that exists everywhere.