without modern product moat, legacy products and infrastructure is useless. It's like Microsoft saying I have excel, Azure and CoPilot.

You are stating generalities when more specific information is easily available.

Google has AI infrastructure that it has created itself as well as competitive models, demonstrating technical competence in not-legacy-at-all areas, plus a track record of technical excellence in many areas both practical and research-heavy. So yes, technical competence is definitely an advantage for Google.