On the contrary I had completely written off Google until a few days ago.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is finally competitive with GPT/Claude, their Deep Research is better and has a 20/day limit rather than 10/month, and now with a single run of Veo 2 I’ve gotten a much better and coherent video than from dozens of attempts at Sora. They finally seem to have gotten their heads collectively unstuck from their rear end (but yeah it sucks not having access).