You're dead right on your last point, and I think Play Store revenues ever getting substantial is amazingly unlikely.
The thing is this is why the Chrome development strategy is backwards: by going on about "apps" all the time the Chrome team is encouraging data walled garden style web app development which if successful would be equally dangerous to Google as mobile native apps are. How they convinced the higher ups that this was strategically sound is beyond me, and anyone would be tempted to think it was just a corporate turf war.
The thing is this is why the Chrome development strategy is backwards: by going on about "apps" all the time the Chrome team is encouraging data walled garden style web app development which if successful would be equally dangerous to Google as mobile native apps are. How they convinced the higher ups that this was strategically sound is beyond me, and anyone would be tempted to think it was just a corporate turf war.