Producing closed product ecosystems is hardly "evil". Don't like it, don't buy/support it. (Now try getting away from the Google surveillance system on the web. Can you opt out?)
Yes, you can; just block all of Google's known IP blocks in /etc/hosts.deny, or send all their domains to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts
A bit more than the average user can manage, and not so good as actually opting out (in the sense of getting Google to throw away all of their records on you), but you always have complete control of which pages your computer will load.
