I think both have their merits, but I think engineers should be the ones building projects/companies, and management should be the ones who run it. I don't think non-technical management should fundamentally be involved in development unless it's a manager who is also an engineer. In a sense, a traditional non-technical manager should be in charge of the monotonous, boring stuff and that only... stuff like QA, ops, marketing, etc... Basically maintenance-mode autopilots.

I'm a big fan of engineers turned manager though, after working with several different projects at my last company. The only problem with that is when their manager isn't an engineer and you end up with the same disconnect that you would normally get at the dev/manager level. It sounds like Google is, in reality, trying to eliminate that disconnect entirely, with managerial engineers the entire way up to CEO.