What "allocation is a joke" experiences have you had?
I met with the team, and told my recruiter that I didn't mind working with them (though it's not clear what would have happened if I had). I was then given a form with room for a dozen teams, and asked to rank my only choice on a scale from 1-10.
You're right that anybody can ask for a team. In practice, most don't realize that they should be discussing allocation before they sign the offer letter, when they have the most leverage.
I know of people asking for and getting put on 'interesting teams' -- only to find themselves idiotically placed, in parts of a shockingly large team that make no sense given their backgrounds and motivations.
It's not the end of the world, but it makes for a tough first year.
I made some other points at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801866.
I don't want to focus on my experiences in public. They've given me a bias, yes, but lots of other sample points I've gathered indicate that allocation is broken, and that it's not a priority to fix it. Nooglers have to be prepared to sink or swim.
A. Inevitably in a company of this size, certain groups and certain job categories have more trouble filling positions than others.
B. The technology stack at Google is deep and complex, has poor useability, and requires time to acquire fluency in. Given a choice any group will recruit experienced Googlers over nooglers.
C. Combine A and B and you end up in a situation where nooglers are, by and large, shoveled into large projects that 'nobody wants to go to'.
D. In theory you get to chat with 6 different groups. In practice things are far more perfunctory. 2 or even 1 is not uncommon (running out of time like prospero is common: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801016). If you indicate the weakest sense of 'yeah I could work in this team,' prepare to receive no more options.
E. The difference in quality of service (response time, level of understanding of your situation) between hiring and allocation is night and day. It's obvious why: hiring has to interact with recruits before they commit to joining, while allocation interacts after.
F. Even if you had 6 options, you're still chatting with managers in the presence of a huge information imbalance. You have nothing to go on but what they tell you. Even without meaning to be misleading or dishonest, they're unlikely to give you more than a perfunctory understanding of what your prospective team does, what it's working on (they wouldn't have mentioned Google+), or what skills it requires (rarely what you were interviewed about).
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Google's a great place to work, and it's been very good to me. I've learned huge quantities working here. None of these problems are insurmountable. I see signs that they're seasonal; they gradually get worse for a time until they start impacting metrics, at which point leadership focuses on them and fixes them for a time. Some of us have a tough first year; it's not the end of the world.
You haven't addressed his fundamental complaint: don't contact him.
"As for what team you'll be working on, you as a candidate have a lot of power in that regard."
Are you serious? Allocation is a joke. It's hard to say what you are willing to work on in sufficient detail when you don't know what choices you have.
(I work at Google.)