* They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all.*
Regardless of how you feel about how it turned out, they clearly have spent the past two years focusing on unifying design and UX across their products.
It's helpful to have meaningfully consistent metaphors and themes across applications. For the UNIX / Linux commandline, that's processes and pipes, BSD and GNU argument flags, and the like.
There are various competing keyboard accelerator schemes: emacs, vi, Wordperfect keyboard templates, DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x/NT, Apple's Mac hotkeys, GNOME and KDE....
There are fundamental layout, font, and color palette schemes.
But one of the worst overall design features I see is taking a given scheme and applying it without regard to suitability across a wide range of applications with a wide range of use cases. For Google this results in the insanity of persistent browser elements occupying 25-30% of vertical screen real estate in Gmail, Groups, Book search, and other products. When the workaround is for me to either push my browser window half-height above my viewable monitor frame and drag down the bottom of the window, to be able to present my work front and center, or to open the elements inspector and delete elements from the DOM just to be able to see the relevant work, something's very, very wrong.
Microsoft of course was infected with similar idiocy with its modal, non-resizeable dialogs and wizards. Even GNOME, for all its UI/UX brain death, generally provides for resizable dialogs, and allows text to be copied from its error pop-ups (under Windows the only recourse was and to the best of my knowledge remains screenshotting the damned thing).
The worst thing for me is that they design for big screens and I have small one. Even when you pick up compact scheme.
The record was stats screen on blogger which shown me 3cm of information panel and the rest was taken by huge sticky !mostly empty! top and bottom rows.
You see that everywhere, unfortunately. I'm on a 2012 Macbook Air, and the Bootstrap documentation's sidebar navigation doesn't fit in the height of my screen.
If that doesn't demonstrate how hard it is to get responsive web design right, I don't know what does!
Ironically: I've got a reasonably large screen (1920x1080), but with a 16x9 aspect ratio, height is constrained. The physical size of the display is fairly small, so px-specified layouts (particularly for fonts) are often painfully small.
I haven't made any real use of Windows in over a decade. I know that functionality didn't exist as of WinXP and probably later. When was it added / where do you see it?
This goes back to at least XP, if not 2000. You don't see it since you're just pressing a hotkey and get something in the clipboard. In the same way you would make a screenshot which is also not a visible operation per se.
Regardless of how you feel about how it turned out, they clearly have spent the past two years focusing on unifying design and UX across their products.