I'm sure the patent is overly broad, as broad as the USPTO's let Google's lawyers get away with.
I'm just saying that what they've implemented is qualitatively different and an invention compared to your clever shellscripting, even though you can call them "sort of the same thing" from a sufficiently philosophical point of view.
cat somefile.txt | grep sometext | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | wc
Is technically in violation of the map reduce patent, it is that broad.
Go read the thing, seriously it is very interesting reading.
The meat is this section:
"A large-scale data processing system and method includes one or more application-independent map modules configured to read input data and to apply at least one application-specific map operation to the input data to produce intermediate data values, wherein the map operation is automatically parallelized across multiple processors in the parallel processing environment. A plurality of intermediate data structures are used to store the intermediate data values. One or more application-independent reduce modules are configured to retrieve the intermediate data values and to apply at least one application-specific reduce operation to the intermediate data values to provide output data."