I don't get it, and I found it very hard to read meaning into all the superlatives.
Haven't there been more Linux devices than Windows devices for a long time now? For every PC that maps 1:1 to the owner's digital life, there are probably three toasters and a smart fridge running Linux. In the future, they will run Android. How does that help Google or hurt Microsoft? Apple could probably switch all their non-iOS iPods to run a modified Android and not a single thing would change.
So far, Android has only "won" the smartphone game by numbers. And in the process, Samsung has become an internal monopoly. I'm not convinced that this is the solid foundation on which mankind's digital future will be built.
But will Android clothes have an awesome UI layer? Not to downplay Android's success, I find it very hard to follow the jump from smartphones to everything else. I don't see Android scaling up (to run on computers like Windows 8). And when it scales down, Google doesn't win anything.
The OP reminds me of business analysts in the last years. Some metric in the PRC increases XX% year over year, and a short back-of-the-envelope calculation later, Westerners shouldn't teach their kids anything but Mandarin anymore. And Android is not even as autonomous as the PRC. Suppose it runs on 99% of all devices (whatever that means at the time) - I can easily imagine a court forcibly separating Google's services from the OS.
Haven't there been more Linux devices than Windows devices for a long time now? For every PC that maps 1:1 to the owner's digital life, there are probably three toasters and a smart fridge running Linux. In the future, they will run Android. How does that help Google or hurt Microsoft? Apple could probably switch all their non-iOS iPods to run a modified Android and not a single thing would change.
So far, Android has only "won" the smartphone game by numbers. And in the process, Samsung has become an internal monopoly. I'm not convinced that this is the solid foundation on which mankind's digital future will be built.