Um, Google might hire the occasional star w/o a degree, but you know that you're talking about a company who wants to see your transcripts in the interview process, right? So, Google's clearly not an example of the kind of company that doesn't treat degrees as a requirement (in the overwhelming majority of cases).
BTW, I agree that it's not a good hiring filter (I know a lot of folks who can't be bothered to apply to FB or Google because of the insanely long/tedious recruiting process), but it's pretty common practise, even in pretty high-performance tech companies.
a company who wants to see your transcripts in the interview process
Sure, if you have no work experience. That's the case everywhere.
(Google is highly hype-oriented; not everyone there is Guido van Rossum. I worked at a company that Google bought. I had a coworker who started crying when my boss and I taught him what database transactions were and asked him to apply it to fix a race condition in our application. He still works at Google.)
There's a big difference between "requirement" and "taken into consideration". Some companies will refuse to hire people without degrees (so I hear at least), but Google has no such strict rule. They do consider your transcript as part of the hiring process because it does have some non-zero amount of signal in it.
BTW, I agree that it's not a good hiring filter (I know a lot of folks who can't be bothered to apply to FB or Google because of the insanely long/tedious recruiting process), but it's pretty common practise, even in pretty high-performance tech companies.