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What if Google simply see a long-term strategic advantage in helping the web have a free video standard? Especially a standard where they have a significant amount of control over its codebase, tooling, and direction, as well as avoiding the prospect of unknown patent licensing fees on the distant horizon. I mean, Google likes web standards -- the fact they can easily search content allows them to exist -- and audio/video content will make the web more useful which will make their search engine more useful. If Google don't plan to open up the codecs, it certainly makes you wonder why they bought On2.

People act as though the H.264 video tag is a foregone conclusion, but it really isn't - it's still a long way from being viable. Web technologies have never been about what developers want or what sites use but rather what browsers implement, and today ~88% of web-browser marketshare doesn't support the H.264 video tag (58% IE, 28% Firefox, 2% Opera). This is worse than Ogg Theora where ~68% aren't supported, while Flash is unavailable on less than 1% of browsers. Of course, this may change if Microsoft decide one way or another.

Although mobile devices are going to be increasingly relevent in the coming years, it's still a rounding error and users regularly update their handsets, which means the current H.264 support isn't a particularly strong argument in its favour. I suspect that mobile devices will converge towards whatever is done by desktop browsers, as has been the historical trend.