The article mentions that Google will rank you page lower if your site is "slow," which the article says can happen if you install these slow widgets and trackers. Don't forget that Google is not running any javascript, flash or loading images when it requests your page, so they're not affected by these trackers. What Google means by "slow" is how fast your server can return an HTML response.
I don't think so. In the Webmasters Tools you can see that Google has metrics for "Site performance" [1] and for "Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)".
Also, you can see that Google is running JS and loading flash by looking at the Image Preview that appears when you search.
[1] "This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users" http://i.imgur.com/Jfz8O.png
So we're basically both right, but I was wrong in my initial assessment. Their crawler doesn't give them the page speed metrics, they get it from their toolbar data:
Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser. It is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature.
