Google and the Slippery Slope of Portaldom

As Jeremy points out, Google is on the slippery slope to “Portaldom”, despite what CEO Eric Schmidt says here. The thing is, I don't really see anything wrong with this. They say that the clean search-only page will be the default and until they prove otherwise, I believe them. Somewhere along the bubble, “portals” became bad. But I don't think they are bad, they were just done poorly and over-hyped (to say the least). A clean, well thought out, page where you can see a bunch of different things that interest you and access a bunch of tools you use just makes sense. It's great for the vendor too, since if you use their portal you are more likely to use more of their services. The battle here continues to heat up, and the winner is us.
–jeremy