This is horrible move! Why would I want a service I don't need? If they are not profitable on a dry loop then they should increase the price of that specific service.
I am grandfathered in unless I move or change my speed. Even still, I am leaving Verizon because of this move. It just rubs me the wrong way and I do not want to do business with them anymore. Comcast's modem is already on the way and Verizon will be cancelled in a few days.
First, I honestly do not understand the notion that Google is being “Evil” with Search Plus Your World. How is changing your product, whether it ends up being good or bad, evil?
Second, my friends and family have no idea what SPYW is and don’t notice a difference. Heck, the majority of the searches I do are not drastically change to any large degree.
It really depends on what you are doing. I have found it works just fine for me, but I am not able to have a lot of tabs open; under 10 is good. You will notice a slowdown if any of the pages or apps are dynamic or have heavy scripting. My wife tells me Farmville slows it down pretty heavily. Overall it is a awesome device for browsing, blogging, managing your cloud files, and other things like that; if you are looking to be a "power user" you should test one out before making the purchase.
The newer released Chromebooks are a lot faster than the Cr-48 test notebook, but still are not as fast as a full fledged PC for multi-tasking.
Update: Google has confirmed to me that Andrey Petrov is joining them. They were silent about whether or not any assets or property of SocialGrapple were part of the move.