1. a boatload of page view info you are sending off to google

2. it's another dependency that you don't control

To your first point, is this a critique of the speed (pushing info up to Google) or to Google sucking in yet more information? If it's the latter I'm already in trouble because almost everything I do uses Google Analytics, but I can see the point if you're doing something else.

WRT your second point, there's a middle ground of pointing to Google's hosted version for speed and falling back to a local copy if it is not found.

You can see the technique in use within the Boilerplate HTML5 template - http://html5boilerplate.com/ - Scroll down to the index.html file, line 58.

1) They set far in future expires header, so they should see very very little of your page view info.