The original leaked memo that everyone was freaking out about was incredibly overblown as it was entirely decontextualized.
The engineer that wrote the memo needed people for his team. To get people to join a team from any of the others at Google, you need to convince them that your team is awesome to work with. At Google, you can't offer more money/benefits, so it has to be a "join us and you'll change the world!" message. That's going to lead to a lot of overblown statements that may or may not end up being true, and may or may not even be believed by the author.
Google is not in the business of doing things that are bad for the web (and when they have done, there's been an about-face, see: Google Video shutdown), even if internal machinations might make it seem that way.
The engineer that wrote the memo needed people for his team. To get people to join a team from any of the others at Google, you need to convince them that your team is awesome to work with. At Google, you can't offer more money/benefits, so it has to be a "join us and you'll change the world!" message. That's going to lead to a lot of overblown statements that may or may not end up being true, and may or may not even be believed by the author.
Google is not in the business of doing things that are bad for the web (and when they have done, there's been an about-face, see: Google Video shutdown), even if internal machinations might make it seem that way.