“I’m not sure I like the idea of underprivileged children in impoverished communities generating revenue for Google each time they search.”
Well they they would be generating revenue for anyone they pointed that browser to. Even at the lowest end by increasing the visitor count for stats and investors. Out of the big search companies who would be the best one to point it to? Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google.

As far as the no Google ads, that’s very interesting. I know they could be filtered out by the browser, for instance with customizegoogle.com. But this was the first I had heard about this as default behavior. I guess they could filter it out by useragent. Could you check what kind of agent string it reports?

I actually did a little searching to find out if this is mentioned else where. Funny enough they have this screen shot with a Google ad itself.
http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/sharing.shtml / http://laptop.org/en/img/browse-4.gif