I used to work there, started post-IPO, left in December 2010. IMO the answer is absolutely. But that's all I feel I should say.
However, it is known for engineers working on successful teams and products to obtain additional grants that can lead to them leaving Google with several $million worth of stock.
I'm not sure if slewis's 'absolutely' answer is based on something like the latter - in which case you have to make sure you are working on high-value projects that are going somewhere.
But you are competing against 'top-notch' (to quote op of this thread) engineers for those types of awards. You'll also sometimes hear complaints about politics in the promotion process. It seemed mostly fair to me based on the promotions of engineers whose work I was familiar with.