I love the decoupling the driver from the PC idea, but I can't help but wonder where this is all heading.

Isn't Google just re-inventing the mainframe, where they own the mainframe and the rest of us are customers, er dumb terminals? In other words, is this an open standard where any two web-enabled devices can communicate? Or is it a Google-managed service ("we return the status of the print job back to you") where we're yet again investing in the success of Google? Seems like the latter to me. Perhaps I misread it.