They do seem to be adding a little too much to the search engine itself. I just noticed that they've finally hidden "realtime results" behind a link you have to click, instead of shoving random idiotic Twitter crap in your face when you search for current topics.
There's an idea that had some potential, but seems to have made no progress since its debut. It's still no better than a simple Twitter search.
Google seems a little too eager to adopt random crazy ideas (SearchWiki) and a little too willing to kill off good ideas that don't take off quickly enough (Wave). I can't think of a recent new feature or product that was a big success, which is disappointing.