This is just not true. I talk to interviewing developers every day, and very few of them are interviewing at Google.
The final round of on-site interviews usually eats a whole day, and is preceded by a whole battery of time-wasting phone interviews, which themselves eat as much time as a coding challenge and often involve coding with someone else over the phone or Skype.
There are companies that are not Google that have multiple rounds of on-site interviews.
No. Everyone interviews this way. The very most marketable candidates leverage personal brand and connections to dodge a lot of it, but you have to be good at sales to do that.
The final round of on-site interviews usually eats a whole day, and is preceded by a whole battery of time-wasting phone interviews, which themselves eat as much time as a coding challenge and often involve coding with someone else over the phone or Skype.
There are companies that are not Google that have multiple rounds of on-site interviews.