> Does the Google Ads team use Dart on the server-side?
This, alas, falls under the "nothing to publicly announce" umbrella.
> The Dart blog post was unclear about the future of the Dart VM.
The VM team is still moving full speed ahead. In some ways, their job is easier now because they don't have to worry about the (considerable) complexity of integrating the VM into a very large application that already has another language VM, GC, very large set of API bindings (the DOM), etc.
[disclaimer: I work on the dart team]