It's not the only reason but it's one reason I don't use their launcher. Thankfully, it's dead simple to use a different one and doesn't require any weird hacks or jailbreaking. Nova Launcher is the closest thing I've found to an "ideal" Android launcher. Superficially looks the same by default but you can enable or disable the search bar, the persistent Google Now on the leftmost page (seriously, swiping up has always worked just fine for opening Now), and fixing their odd insistence on having so few rows/columns of icons and widgets when screens keep getting larger and higher-resolution.

I understand that you no longer use an Android device but hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who happens to read the comments and has similar wants. There are other launchers but I haven't kept up with them in a while since finding one that works best for me.

Seriously though, how is this:

http://i.imgur.com/kazES2a.png

supposed to be better than this:

http://i.imgur.com/RIKz2qe.png

(in fairness, I had to throw a bunch of icons onto the Google Launcher desktop because it's not my default and I wanted to show how space is used. Also I put neutral-ish wallpapers on so as not to distract but they're not my usual ones.)