I'll have to check what the tape measure does in GE, but you can use the draw (pencil) tool in TF to measure distance, either straightline or along a polyline.
Further, if you draw a ~polygon with it you can then save it out to a GPX file, right click on the track and do "compute area." This could be made more obvious, but the functionality is there.
The only thing you can't do is shade a polygon.
Hope that helps.