Having 7nth way to pay for something is cute, but not exciting.
The real bother is fragmentation. The amount of time wasted integrating to each vendor speech, vision, backend API's is just going to be enormous.
> Maybe one reason for introducing it already now is to start collecting data
With Google, this is always the reason. This is sort of cleverness I admire about them.
Of course things like this already exist, but my phone does not feel particularly "smart" when I need to be making the choices which app to use on which occasion. They could also tie in app discovery to this. "Hey, you are pointing at movie poster but don't have any related apps, would you like to see a list.."
The true power of this of course comes with the augmented reality headsets (Google Glass or whatever it will be in future). Maybe one reason for introducing it already now is to start collecting data. It is certainly interesting for Google to know what kind of things people are pointing their phones at in order to recognize things.