And my argument revolves around iTunes. The sheer amount of content that apple has sold through iTunes would surely suggest that moving to another platform would be a major barrier to transferring to another service.
As you said, Google indeed is doing a fantastic job on a lot of fronts. But from what I see, in this "war" Apple is accomplishing a well executed flank attack by controlling both the hardware and software platforms.
Apple will never get into the search business, but there are so many outliers that many companies (Google, MS, Yahoo etc) have that Apple can out-flank and simple dominate in the long term.
In addition, I'm convinced that Apple is sitting on the AppleTV since they don't yet in their eyes have enough control over games, media content and associated distribution. But, they are headed there, and I would expect that the app Store will soon make it's way to the apple TV (and variants) platform.