I agree with you all that this is surprisingly silly, but I've found a *somewhat* helpful work around.  If you enable keyboard shortcuts (under Settings -> General), the 'n' (next) key will show you the next set of events in the list (starting with the last event of the current list).  This makes it really easy to page forward through events.  Paging backward is less convenient.  The 'p' (previous) key will show you events matching your search terms starting from the previous week.  If you don't have to go to far backward, this works okay.  And remember that the 't' (today) key shows you matching events starting from today.

I find it odd that (i) there appears to be no way to achieve the same effects as 'n' and 'p' via the GUI (the forward and back buttons at the top only advance or go back a day at a time for me), and (ii) Google has implemented such a lame mechanism for going backward (via the 'p' key); stepping back a week at a time is certainly easier to implement than paging backward, but it is far less convenient.

I'm sure they'll fix it one day, but for now this software remains the equivalent of a truly excellent senior project (see http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=388e70bab99367f4&hl=en for an example of another silly oversight that remains ignored).