I'll wager this is more like "Moot finally gets a job." There's nothing about 4chan that's at all appealing to Google. However, as a (still) young coder, being able to say "I was Time Magazine's most influential person of the year and I started one of the biggest and most notorious websites on the Internet" looks not bad. I mean, I wouldn't recommend it to violentacrez but...
I would be, honestly. Moot successfully built a pirate kingdom with no accountability, no marketability, no remuneration and no commercial potential whose primary contributions to world culture are lolcats and serial shooters. Everything Moot has touched since 4chan has turned to shit. I'm more willing to believe they hired him by mistake than that they're using him as a traffic draw.
It wasn't attractive to me either, but then I didn't find 4chan interesting, so I just assumed I wasn't the audience. There were a lot of people spending a lot of time drawing genitals, swastikas and pedobears to undermine its attempt at being kinder, gentler 4chan though.
I never participated in /b/ but I watched it sometimes. It was like staring into the id. THAT is the fundamental issue with marketing to the /b/tards: 4chan is a digital toilet stall for graffiti, not a gallery for artwork or a bulletin board for community messages. It exists as a safe space for being vile and most advertisers want the vile stuff discouraged. This is the problem Chris Poole (and Alexis Ohanian, and Kevin Rose) face: it's easy to build a community when you're doing nothing to keep out the elements that advertisers and the greater media despise. As soon as you try to be a citizen, you discover the exact same problems that everyone else has been dealing with while you were off in the hinterlands. Google has no hinterlands and never will. They often buy them and then sell them when it gets them in trouble.
I don't think I like equating keeping out elements advertisers and the greater media despise with being a citizen. /b/ is vile, but not because it's not a good community to have brands associated with. I would not mourn 4chan's passing if it went away, but we could use more places that are indifferent to advertisers.
I... don't know if this is google trying to find a way to cash in on digital subculture, or if they want to know how to keep their websites running on almost no money, as 4chan has for basically its entire existence.
I think the consensus is hiring guys like Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Peter Norvig is more a prestige thing than a business thing. They do some work that's useful to Google, but mostly they just do what they please and Google gets to brag about having them. moot isn't anywhere near those guys' league by any standard, but I could see them hiring him just because he's the 4chan guy. It's not like payroll is a big problem for them.
You're probably right, I'm likely making more of this than there is.