Maybe none of the stuff that he/she does sounds as cool as just grabbing a couple thousand machines to run some MapReduce... just for kicks. I doubt that everyone at Google is always running interesting-sounding side projects.
FWIW, I regularly grab a couple thousand machines to run some MapReduce over all of Google's copy of the web. This is not a one-off occurrence, it is (for me, someone whose "official" job duties usually focus on UI) a roughly once-a-month occurrence. It can be as much as several times a day for people whose daily job is crunching data.
I also work on a team where I am the only one without an advanced degree, and all but two of the others' have Ph.Ds. Two of my teammates graduated college at 20. Many of them have published.
And I get to push cool things out to the results page with fairly little bureaucracy. Sometimes I even get to do it in response to HN users' comments:
The thing is, if I'd just said "I get to do this, and I get to do that", this comment would've read "Yes, but I doubt you're a typical Googler. I doubt that everyone at Google is always running interesting-sounding side projects." Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
(Truth be told, not everyone at Google is running interesting-sounding side projects. The point is that everyone at Google has the ability to run interesting-sounding side projects. Whether you make the time to do it is up to you.)
Your examples are all things that were promised during the hiring process, not your own experience. This raises a red flag for me.