Interesting opinions. I actually like the black, its different and easy on the eyes. I actually set my ide's to black/darker when coding and use a dark theme on my GUI.
Google has never, ever failed to give me results faster than a heartbeat. Even a 1-2 second delay between VERY simple searches is discouraging from those two sites.
Google has ground to a halt on a few occasions especially in the early days, and has been ddosed once or twice. Dont forget this is a new site with possibly a fraction of the servers google has. The news releases around the world have probably steared more traffic than they can handle. Its like there's some overwhelming desire to use something that's different to what everybody else uses, regardless of whether its any better or not.
There is. Why be a sheep? If all men started wearing make up because others were doing it and it was better for your skin, doesn't mean i would. Even if some giant makeup corporation insisted i should.