Not a detail at all: the author seems to confuse "the whole Google cloud system works as expected - approximately in line with the 80/20 adage" for "the phone in my pocket is independently capable of intelligent, contextful, humanlike reasoning."

Google just needs to see where the previous million people went after asking this particular question - odds are good that the million-and-first person will also want that particular answer. It's a clever trick all right, and a marvel of engineering, but no robots: this is mostly human behavior: collected, averaged, and parrotted back. (Yes, there is machine search at the base of it; unlike Altavista before, the relevance of the results is shaped by its human users though)