I'm not sure Google has yet figured out how or why it wants to make such products. I don't understand how apps like Trips or Reader get launched given that they seemed destined for at most mild success, but one possibility is that the people behind them at the time promised some sort of larger success to motivate their funding.

True story: I worked on a small Google product where at one point our sales team got a customer interested in a $1m contract, which was a decent amount of money for the scale of our product. But the customer wanted some adjustment in some of the wording. We couldn't get a Google lawyer to even look at the result -- it wasn't worth their time for such a small amount of money -- and I believe lost the customer as a result.

To your specific question, I think there is lots of room in the world for fundamentally OK products -- but outside of Google. I love Pinboard for example (well, I don't use it, but I'm rooting for him).