Google Search JSON API

Google is obviously producing JSON outputs from most (if not all) of its search offerings because they have an API called "Google AJAX Search API". Signing up for a key allows a developer to pull search results for use on web pages in a manner identical to my iSpecies Clone. However, it is an absolute pain in the neck to use this API. It is nowhere near as useful as Yahoo's web services. Google goes to great lengths to obfuscate the construction of its JSON outputs and these are produced from RESTful URLs, buried deep in its JavaScript API. So, I went on a hunt...

Within a JavaScript file called "uds_compiled.js" that gets embedded in the page via the API, there are several functions, which are (somewhat) obvious:
GwebSearch(), GadSenseSearch(uds), GsaSearch(uds) [aside: Is this Google Scholar? There is no documentation in the API how-to], GnewsSearch(), GimageSearch(), GlocalSearch(), GblogSearch(), GblogSearch(), and finally GbookSearch().
Since all these functions are called from JSON with an on-the-fly callback, why make this so difficult to? If I had some time on my hands, I'd deobfuscate the API to see how the URLs are constructed such that I could reproduce Yahoo's API. Incidentally, I just now noticed that Yahoo has an optional parameter in its API called "site" whereby one can limit the search results to a particular domain (e.g. site=wikipedia.org).

So Google, if you are now producing an API like AJAX Search, why make it so difficult and force the output into a Google-based UI? Developers just want the data. You could just as easily force a rate limit as does Yahoo for its API: 5,000 queries per IP per day per API. Problem solved.