The thing I love about Google Earth is that until you get to the airplane level, it's just a cartoon earth.
There is no realistic portrait of the earth from afar. The google earth globe is just a 3d model, with photoshop textures. Seems it would really be more accurate to have actual pictures of the globe at that distance...kind of seems like the whole point of Google earth actually, else why not just use maps. None of it looks real until you get to the obviously real, airplane-taken photographs at a certain level of zoom.
Just an observation.