I love Google as much as the next guy, but how could a legitimate business that handles money not have a phone number to call to speak to a human to resolve this? It's absolutely ridiculous that they can threaten your livelihood and not have a human to talk to.
As bad as Paypal is, at least they offer live phone support. With the products I sell, Google Checkout and Paypal aren't options, so even with all the red tape you must go through to get a merchants account, I'd still rather do that than use Google Checkout/Paypal.
I would suggest it's not so much the availability of the phone call which is the problem, but the policy which requires that all of this information be submitted after some arbitrary dollar limit after all of these sales.
I am not sure waiting on hold, voice mail hell, and talking to a support person is really a superior customer experience. I generally prefer email support, if it is fast and you get a case that can be tracked. This is not to say that it's not bad customer support, because it is bad customer support, but I don't think having Google add a massive bank of phone support people somewhere is going to help.
It's a trade off - many of their products are free or low cost, in exchange they are keeping their costs down by not offering phone support.
Although I've found this irritating at times too, I overall think it's a great choice (and business decision) for Google.
They are essentially saying "we build products for smart people who don't need a lot of hand holding - if you need to talk to someone on the phone this might not be the product for you - we will still get feedback from customers and look out for big problems using forums and other technology solutions, but we try not to do call centers".
Google is TERRIBLE at this retail stuff. They are truly atrocious.
And while Paypal hooked up Canadian merchants almost on day one, years after starting Google's system still can't handle that (which is why Canadians and many other nationalities can't sell on the market).
As bad as Paypal is, at least they offer live phone support. With the products I sell, Google Checkout and Paypal aren't options, so even with all the red tape you must go through to get a merchants account, I'd still rather do that than use Google Checkout/Paypal.