I was thinking more along the lines of exception to the rule. I honestly have some trouble finding another product by Google which has this attention to detail (design-wise), maybe Chrome...
Chrome on OSX is fantastic, my only beef being that some options are in unintuitive places. For example, 'Extensions' is under 'Window'. Why? There's a perfectly good crescent wrench just sitting by its lonesome self over there there in the corner. I've found Chrome to be the only browser that broke away from the traditional browser format, and pulled it off beautifully. By contrast, FF 3.6 on OSX is hideous.
I find that link pretty interesting but I still don't understand why you say that. I'm saying Google caring about design on Google Maps is the exception that proves the rule (the rule being that they don't care much about design).
There isn't a rule that "Google don't care about design" if there is an exception. Exceptions to rules disprove rules. However, an explicit exception to an unwritten rule suggests the existence of that rule - for example, a sign saying "Parking allowed between 9am and 5pm" would imply that there is a rule that parking is not allowed at any other time.