It's fairly ironic--Google is restricting the page views (to limit bandwidth usage), but at that same time they're hosting a copy in cache of that same page, with no limits.
I find "Google 2009 == GeoCities 1999" very thinkable, especially if tweaked a little to "Google Sites 2009 == GeoCities 1999".
Empires rise and fall fast on the net. Google is now a mish-mash of offerings which get uneven attention from their internal talent. 'Sites' itself is a successor to the soon-to-be-shuttered Google Page Creator (which unlike Sites allowed custom CSS and JS). A few key people leave, a couple bad quarters -- 'Sites' could get the axe too.
Because otherwise, Google 2009 == GeoCities 1999, and that would be unthinkable.