Actually...
That's really quite nice - the background images are fairly sizable (well over 100k) but, by default they're not on; they are optional.
Remember that at least part of the reason that Google got where they have today was their uncluttered search page with minimal images; makes it really fast to load (and in the early days the average connection speed was probably somewhere around the 50k dial-up mark).
The new Ask interface follows those early Google principles while giving a bit of optional extra "fluff" for the iPod generation - as long as you don't disable JavaScript in your browser of course.
"Hi I'm a Google, and I'm an Ask" ?