this is definitely a power user feature and obscenely useful. i kind of saw this one coming a few months ago when i realized the drop down to view the cached version of some webpages just wasn't showing up, and here it is confirmed.
basically if the top result for your search query now goes to a URL that 404s or has been dramatically changed since last indexing, you're shit out of luck as far as google is concerned, go click on an ad instead, they won't give you the tools to make search useful because that's not what it's for anymore
the good news is you can get SOME of this functionality back (admittedly in situations where you're at least a bit lucky) with the internet archive's wayback machine... which has a VERY convenient plugin available here for firefox for viewing and saving webpages via an added entry in the right click dropdown
