What this blog post doesnt say, is that google completely ignored the perfectly valid current Jingle draft for RTP video (XEP-0167) and instead invented their own (and doing very weird things like signalling audio+video streams together, although they're different streams).

They also use a variant of H.264 that basically nobody else uses (H264/SVC), for which there are no free codecs available, and provide no fallback to some other codec for interoperability reasons.

Google might have the best intentions, but until they adress these issues (well, too late for the signalling, but the codec problem is more important), they can't seriously talk about the spirit of open communications.