It's growing on me. They scored major points when they recently introduced the Reminder feature for new episodes of TV shows you watch. I was maintaining my viewing schedule using a Microsoft Word document.
It's not a complete failure by sheer virtue of the fact that they've designed the entire Google experience around this cloud identity. I don't see it usurping Facebook as a social scrapbooking platform, anytime soon, but despite all the unattached fluff accounts, they're managing to integrate and network real identities into the service simply by forcing any Android phone users (and that's 80% of smartphone users now) to register their device using a Google+ account (instead of a Gmail account) in order access the Google Play Store. Gmail has been relegated to another satellite service maintained under the umbrella of Google+, not vice versa.
