I strongly strongly agree with you about new-grad Googlers not knowing how good they have it (food/gym/tgif? TECH STOP!), and I agree with you about degrees too. As an amusing joke the article's close enough to home to be funny; as a serious criticism... well, it's far enough off to be funny.
The proprietary thing is dead-on, though. I started listing major proprietary technologies, got close to twenty, and decided I wasn't sure how much of that was trade secret, and deleted it. Google technology looks like we're on a different Galapagos island from the rest of tech, and the landbridge sunk into the sea in 2003, and once in a while a bird in a windstorm carries a seed across. Usually Google tech is superior to comparable outside tech, sometimes it's inferior.
As an aside for Googlers, have you seen that Facebook thing "Buck", that some ex-Googler named Michael Bolin "invented"? I don't even know what to say.