Google Blogoscoped has what I take to be a very insightful look into Google's recent gains on the iPhone:
I’ve been surprised by Google’s rapid redesign of its mobile services to support the iPhone: In less than 6 months, Google has created custom iPhone interfaces for all its key services. But it may have an ulterior motive.
Google are gaining considerable experience developing its mobile services for its new platform – Android. But look a little closer. The iPhone and Android share the common foundations in the open source browser WebKit –
"WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE."
And on Google’s Android website:
"[Android’s] integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine."
Hence, what we may be actually looking at is Google’s mobile services which will be available on Android from its launch, effectively putting iPhone users through the pain of finding the flaws.
This is almost certainly the case. Really interesting.