I think people have this vision that Google is very capable and but the Emperor may actually have no clothes ...

No doubt their research is top tier (note that until now they didn't even merge their AI labs), but that is very different to releasing AI products. They could have released numerous products in this space, but they didn't.

Only now that they are forced to are they even trying and woe and behold they were unprepared. They got complacent and underdog sucker punched them to attention. Microsoft may have got lucky with their particular bet on AI but they are pushing very hard and it's great to see some competition.

I hope Google bring their A game but they have to beat Bing and GPT4 on price, quality and ecosystem, that may be quite challenging event with their resources