[sonupundir]

Actually, I'm not sure if you are rather not contradicting yourself as most of the more technical projects - or the core technologies used by them, for example, webkit for chrome, dalvik for android and so on - (which the parent was presumably talking about) - correct me if I'm wrong here - were not developed at Google but at other (i.e. the developers of these projects, typically, didn't come through the Google's recruitment process) companies which were later taken over by Google.

It seems disingenuous to have the achievements of those companies be co-opted by/as Google/'s

[cromwellian]

Most of the improvements in Chrome were wholly done at Google. V8 was done from scratch at Google, as well as the security system, and Google contributed more to WebKit over the last few years than Apple (just go look at the commit graphs). The majority of Android/Dalvik was done at Google after Danger was acquired AFAIK. Google didn't acquire Android ready made.

These days, most software isn't developed in a vacuum. WebKit was a fork of KHTML. Does Apple get no credit for the changes made to it?

Google Maps and Google Earth were acquisitions as well, but the state of those products when they were acquired compared to where they are not is completely different.