[rryan]

Hm, I don't think so. This post is dated May 3rd, which predates the Skype deal's announcement by 7 days. Also, the WhatWG group for RTC's mailing list was first posted to April 12, 2011. So that potentially indicates this was in the works beforehand. Since Google purportedly put in a bid for Skype they no-doubt knew Skype was on the market, though.

I would guess this is more likely a response to FaceTime. Apple's core business is around getting people to buy iPhones, and FaceTime is exclusive to the iPhone and other Apple products.

[rdtsc]

There is an IETF realtime-web working group :

http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/charters

and this is part of Google's involvement with that.

However the original question is still valid, as this release might have been accelerated quite a bit because MS bought Skype.

[TuxPirate]

We can also see the project's creation time on http://code.google.com/p/webrtc/updates/list, Jan 27 2011