I am sure they are earnest in their efforts, I chuckled when I read "Some of our engineers have been working on this problem for two years, ..." because I know engineers who have been working on that problem for 20 years and they still haven't got it right. One of them (at Intel in the '80s) had a poster that said "Time flies like an Arrow, Fruit Flies like a Banana." which captured the challenge for him. One of the founders of Android, Rich Miner, was an Amiga guy that I knew peripherally through the developers network. He did a company called WildFire which was an assistant that would be on the phone with you that you could ask things of or make requests too. Also felt the problem space was huge, then there were no less than three Phd's at Google who gave a tech talk on the Goog-411 project where they were listening to people ask for phone numbers and trying to figure out what number they were looking for. (one domain of questions so almost like cheating).

Perhaps they just write optimistically, I am excited to seem them working on the problem (I'd suggest they search blekko since we can add slashtags and do better domain search but that is just me). Having seen the folks who have run at this problem and been knocked on their backsides I have tremendous respect for taking on a really really hard problem. Can't wait for the beta.