The claim is that Google has larger pipes that go all the way out of the building. While mainframes have short pipes that go only to a heat exchanger on the end of the hack.

IMO, it's not a big difference. There are probably many details more noteworthy than this. And yeah, mainframes are that way because the vendor only creates them up to the hack-level, while Google has the "vendor" design the entire datacenter. Supercomputers have had single-vendor datacenters for decades too, and have been using large pipes for a while too.