Made a rather simple implementation of the GlobeSource in PVGeo which goes ahead and adds texture coordinates that make sense for the outside surface of a sphere and can be easily tweaked to provide desired effects. The code can be found here and the wrappings for ParaView can be found here.
Here is an interactive example of the sphere it produces.
And below is a screenshot of what this looks like in ParaView. Note that I added some sliders to control the resolution of the parallels and meridians. I gave it default values that make sense for the Earth. The texture applied is the same JPEG that @jkulesza posted above and was loaded with no transformations.
