A fantastic long term recruiting move. It's like Apple getting their systems into schools, or Microsoft giving away it's development environments to colleges to base their course work around (and Sun/Java). Google is presenting course work that is tailored to their needs for graduates coming out of school. It'll be a natural progression of smart talented students leaving school and walking into Google, who has always had a long history of hiring people with advanced degree's.

I looked into the algorithms section and, unfortunately, even the great schools (Northwestern included) are still teaching intro courses using sequential models. I think we need to address parallel algorithms (parallel quicksort, parallel prefix, etc.) from the very beginning if we want to institute parallel thinking. Tacking it on as an afterthought two semesters later isn't the same. And yes, I'm very aware that this sounds like "Teaching of Sequential Algorithms Considered Harmful." ;)