True, sorta.

In my past experiences, if you're on tor (or proxy'd through a known portal), and have Javascript disabled entirely, Google will sometimes (not always) give you an error stating that your IP is a known abuser. If you DO have JS enabled, I have encountered the "Your IP is known to be abusive, so type in this captcha in order to continue" and then it forwards to encrypted.google.com.

I get similiar behaviour with VPNs & Google.

To be fair it's quite likely your IP has been abusive. There aren't that many exit nodes and it doesn't seem unlikely that a lot of Tor users have suspicious or malicious behavior.

Though to the point, the IPs of all exit nodes are publicly available and presented by the Tor project itself.

I never realized that turning on/off noscript had something to do with google blocking me, thanks.

Makes sense -- most bots don't run JS.

Definitely, I guess this means all I need is phantom.js to steal all of google's search results now.

TOR/SSH Tunnel + startpage.com + Stylish extension + Startpage Google Look = hehe ;)