That's what Google Labs was. If they had kept Google Labs and released some of these products under that brand, people might not be as worried about them killing the full-fledged Google projects when experiments are ended.
for example, "Google Allo" could have just been released as "Allo", separate website and everything, and if Google feels it's working out and is the future of their messaging platform, eventually officially bring it in to the Google ecosystem. sort of like a buyout