Yeah, ugh, what were they thinking? The whole point of a fan letter is the personal connection, telling that person you admire who you are and why they inspire you.
If you compare this with the recent Apple add of crushing everything into a thin tablet, I can at least see the reasoning and the benefit. They should have seen it from other perspectives and changed it, but there is something smart there. This is just not smart from any perspective, and it's hard to imagine how people at Google didn't understand this.