It all depends on what you're using "time" for and what you're using as your ground truth.
As far as I understand, Google uses synchronized time for lots stuff like of query ordering and vector clocks etc and it is important for them to have one ground truth up to the point that they install their own GPS clocks in datacenters. As these are mostly for the use by Google, it's up to them to decide how they will handle the additional second, and I can understand from a risk assessment point of view that it's likely less risk to have slightly longer seconds instead of having one additional second with the number 60 and auditing your code for the parts where that becomes relevant.
The situation becomes interesting when the private use/decision of Google leaks out into the real world for (say) Google Cloud Engine users or whoever else relies on Google infrastructure and timekeeping.
Personally I can't imagine situations where the exact and synchronized duration of a second is important to you but you don't have your own synchronized clock(s), but you'll have to be prepared for an apparent one second gap when comparing the timestamps of Google infrastructure with the timestamps of your own infrastructure, and over time, the two kinds of timestamps will diverge until at 2017-01-01 00:00:00Z where they will suddenly converge again.
If this is your first time dealing with diverging clocks, it will be an interesting learning experience, especially if you did to GPS-based time exactly to avoid this situation.
In reply to Re^3: Leap second coming up. Check your date handling code
by Corion
in thread Leap second coming up. Check your date handling code
by 1nickt
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