Wow...this is definitely not expected from Google...it could be that both just coincidently picked the same layout but the chance of that happening are like 1 out of a 1000.
Maybe Google did rip it off blindly or maybe it is Yahoo! who made the snatch but it does not comply with my puny little reasoning machine that the organization with world-class researchers and developers would have to plagiarize a single page like this.
cant believe that google have optimised IE7... Its nice to do that... but seems MS made the designs for both the companies... as its their product!! Either ways google has contributed to Mozilla for firefox. So this seems a little out of the picture!