I suspect google, like many of us, is either designing 'mobile first', or at least prioritizing mobile highly enough that they will never design a fundamental interaction that requires 'hover' to work.
It's easy enough to tap a menu to get it to open. As an iPad user, I don't think I would mind a well-designed hover-centric workflow, as long as it works okay on touch too.
It would have to be well-designed, though. Apparently it's really easy to wind up with a moronic hover-based menu, judging by the number of them I see around.
The trouble is that android doesn't support hover-events the way iOS does. On iOS taps automatically turn into hovers when there is a hover behaviour, on android a tap is always a click.
It would have to be well-designed, though. Apparently it's really easy to wind up with a moronic hover-based menu, judging by the number of them I see around.