Google TOS have been relaxed a bit in April 2014. Now it states:
"Don’t misuse our Services. For example, don’t interfere with our Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide."
So the passage about "automated means" and scripts is gone now. It evidently still is not the desired (by google) way of accessing their services, but I think it is now formally open to interpretation of what exactly an "interface" is and whether it makes any difference as of how exactly returned HTML is processed (rendered or parsed). Anyhow, I have written a Java convenience library and it is up to you to decide whether to use it or not:
https://github.com/afedulov/google-web-search
