It's a little feature, but its appearance is significant in at least a couple ways. First, it's damn cool. Previous attempts to add graphic design to a personalized homepage have led to overdone effects where you can't read what's on the screen. This one is beautifully minimalist, per Google style. Also per Google style, there is a minimalist twist: you can put in your location and the theme setting updates according to your local time of day. Maybe I'm crazy but I think that is just super sweet.
A second point of importance is that this represents another step away, in a sense, from the blank, famous, traditional Google home page. It's only a step away "in a sense" because if you go to www.google.com and you've never heard of this personalized home page, you get the traditional one. Moreover, Google does not push the customizable homepage very actively. And in fact, a very small percentage of people have experience with it or know what it is.
This is not helped by the fact that it has the unmeaningful URL of http://www.google.com/ig and the unmemorable title of "Personalized Homepage." And this brings us from a little feature to one of the top two or three issues on Google's plate these days: how to integrate and brand its products. This technology-driven and -inspired company is maturing into a realm where marketing management is increasingly relevant. Personalized Homepage Themes are not a technology development at all. My Yahoo! is a bazillion years old. They are sweet by virtue of product design that is 99% psychographic and 1% technological.
Depending on who at the company you ask, Google sometimes describes itself as a technology company, sometimes as a media company. I think you can use this new little feature to tell a story about how Google started with a technology model and is maturing, as the vast majority of technology companies do, into a marketing model. Not to say that Google won't be developing any new technologies, but rather that the sweetness of its new products will have a lot to do with their integration and design according to personal needs and psychologies, not new algorithms.
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