I'll be the first to give them credit when they follow through on something.
On another site, which was also on HN (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/introducing-project-l...), they are more forthcoming about the scale of the challenge and the likelihood of success. I like the tone of that page much more than this one.
People say this as if this was a law of physics. It's not. The company buildings will not spontaneously combust if they try to do something that is not calculated to make optimal short-term profit. They prove, time and again, that they care about awesome/worldchanging more than they care about the money. As someone pointed out in other thread, they even structured their stock options so that grumpy shareholders who care only about short-term profit can't get in the way.