Not sure I agree with all the points made in this article (actually I'm pretty sure a lot of it is off). That being said I think Google has a track record of using the "boiling frog" strategy: not much fuss when adding new features, going easy on the PR for new tools and just slowly, but surely, surrounding the user.

I think indeed, the wide variety of very high quality verticals being progressively tied up together with G+ around its users, wherever they come from, will do quite some collateral damages. We'll see if it extends to Facebook and the likes.