Google says "...we think there is room for more competition..." - but now they own both how most people find tickets and the service that provides the link between the airlines and the internet. My guess is that they will keep with their mantra of giving user's the fastest possible answer by providing links to buy tickets in response to queries like "cheap sf tickets". Problems for companies like Orbitz ahead?

Google is already starting to apply this approach to accommodation, another high value segment. Searches for hotels in most cities now return as their first result a Google map with listings of actual hotels - over time I expect these to become more expansive and traffic to independent hotel aggregators to decline. With the current strategy Google is moving to an approach where they scrape review and hotel data from all the aggregators and then serves this in its own listings - eliminating the need for its users to perform a secondary search with a independent aggregator.