No, it's not the same as ELB. It's similar to Amazon's auto scaling feature that comes with AWS Auto Scaling Groups. There's a key difference, though. AWS ASG is threshold based: users define actions when specified metrics exceed predefined threshold. In contrast, Google's autoscaling is goal oriented: users do not define action. They simplify specify desired values of specified metrics. Google takes care of scaling up or scaling down behind the scene. IMHO, Google's approach gives GCE more room for future optimization.
