It's nothing more, until it finds a way to turn a profit on its other ventures. (Just like those startups - realistically, until they turn a profit, they're just in the exploratory stage.)
Calling google just an ad company is ignoring a large amount of reality.
afaik, hardware is nowhere near close to profitable once you add the costs of Android. Android is an ads delivery channel and a defense against ios usurping an ads delivery channel.
You have a point about gsuite and gcp.
this is a classic misaligned incentive problem though. getting more pay for lower risk just makes the google workers risk-averse, so their success rate will be lower than startup founders who put more on the line (and who are therefore incentivized to make tougher decisions faster/earlier). a former founder-turned-googler friend admitted as much to me in casual conversation.
Probably if Google were broken up we'd see many more and more successful startups, for reasons of funding and talent (and the end of the tendency for Google to make some halting inroad into a niche only to abandon it because of internal politics). That doesn't translate into a better experience for workers though.
You can say, well, those don't count, because Google isn't making money from them! But if you take that route, you also have to exclude all the startups working on "interesting" problems that don't and won't make money. You're left with a very small set of companies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the null set.
I'd say a fair assessment is a random team at Google is as likely to be doing something interesting and beneficial as a team at a random startup (which is to say, unlikely but possible). At Google, though, you're going to have both better average financial outcomes and lower risk.