Continental Europe tends towards having many "good" institutions at the expense of not having the extreme stand-outs like Stanford, MIT, or Harvard. There are also departments within universities which are excellent and well-known in their fields without being as well-known by the general public, as well as research institutes separate from universities, like the Max-Planck societies or EMBL.

Overall, I'd say the model makes it harder for something like Google to be created in Europe, but it makes it easier to get an education that will get you a job at Google.