How is it different to WiFi Direct? Aren't there quite a lot of these wifi-without-base-station standards, but they never seem to work or take off?
Seems Google is leaving it up to the app devs to come up with services, to expect a whole lot of silos to sprout, balkanizing the system.
On that note, i seem to recall Mozilla tried to build something similar into their Firefox for Android at some point. But i can't relocate it now because i can't recall what "catchy" codename they had on the project.