I thought they made it pretty clear that the logistics for distributing actual gifts at Google's growing scale was just not worth it anymore. It probably cost more in time and resources than the gift themselves were worth, let alone the extra tax offset they had to pay on it. I'm not sure why you were lead to believe the Chromebook solution was a "spin". I do agree that giving you a choice of charity though is much better, but I assume they couldn't have pulled it off on short notice.