For the stuff that actually sucks about Google, yes, they were powerless. I think they'd still be on top if they felt they could actually make Google into the company they want it to be. Larry in particular does not give up easily.
Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that.
The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue.
There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.