The news of Google’s purchase of the 5-person Sparrow team struck me as a bit odd. Sure, they’ve done some great things in email with their native iPad app, but the concept that they were purchased “to bring polish, ‘beauty’, and ease of use to all of its Gmail experiences” isn’t jiving. Google has been in email for a long time now and they have a lot of really smart people working on it. It wouldn’t be hard to reverse-engineer anything that anyone is doing in email (it’s not rocket science, after all). Why buy a team? Some would say it’s a value-buy; $25 million is a drop in the bucket for the Mountain View…