> My main take-away from this is that Google Drive seems like a nice way to put presentations online :-)

Don't. I've been trying to access the presentation for 10 minutes and it won't allow me:

    Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears.

and then I get redirected to https://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... (which is stupid, because there's nothing cached/cookied for google. In fact, I'm in Firefox's "Private Browsing")

The right way to distribute slides is with the "published" presentation link, instead of a link to the editor.

For me, it works, but it makes each slide an entry in my browser's history, which I hate.

You can link to certain slides this way. I would consider this a good thing.

In Chrome, it will still show the last history item with a different host at the bottom. So maybe use a better browser ;)