So we invest quite a bit in "the little things." I don't think we'd call them gimmicks. Error messages, for example, certainly aren't gimmicks; they're a classic product feature for an API, but they're afterthoughts in most places and we sweat them enough such that one of every X,000 developers debugging their integration will praise the error message (specifically) to their colleagues or friends. We aspire to that level of care up and down the stack. This includes our web presences; they're shipping software products of our company, after all.
The same sort of chicken-and-egg problem applies to hiring, by the by. The best reason to work somewhere is the colleagues. How do you let people experience the colleagues before the colleagues have convinced them to work for you? Our answer: you create replete evidence that the kind of people you'd end up working with would spend weeks getting a globe animation right and that the people who manage/promote/etc them would say "Absolutely yes, the home page redesign doesn't ship until we have a globe animation we can be proud of."
It's an artistic interpretation of a globe. It's not meant to be a scientifically accurate representation (one could say that the oceans aren't grey either, or that countries aren't sets of dots, or that the Earth isn't a sphere but an oblong spheroid, slightly squished at the poles). Again, scientific accuracy isn't paramount here.
(the developers did an incredible job on that infographic and it's great)
I am amazed that there are companies this big that investing so much time into building what’s essentially a gimmick has positive RoI