That's not the upper hand. The upper hand is having the installed base needed to be able to push through product changes that undermine your competitors' strategic position. Things like being able to continuously track the location of each of your ~2B customers so that you know who is hanging out with whom and can build the social graph that another one of your primary competitors spent a decade curating - or, for that matter, that the KGB causes major diplomatic incidents trying to build.

I think that in this particular case, Google overreached, it's an inconvenience to them, and they'll roll it back. In the general case, though, Google's got way more power than Apple (and more than most nation-states) and they just haven't been called on it yet.