The comparison with Minecraft is absurd. Google already has a whole ecosystem of well-rounded services. They have huge amounts of resources (both money and brains). They removed the "labs" feature by themselves and I take it as a sign that they don't want to push unfinished products to users this way. And when you force users who use Gmail to sign up for Google Plus, it's clearly not a beta product anymore, it's production ready because you are welcoming users by the truckload.

Don't use the "this service is beta" flag as an excuse for the flaws of Google+ and their (mostly horrible) redesigns of their core services. It's clearly not the old Google anymore.