I have no such belief with Google in this case, it's one hobby among many disconnected from their main business. It is search but not web search.
I'm also building a snips.co device and am very interested in offline speach recognition both for pricacy and utility reasons.
By contrast, I chose a Google Home over an Alexa because I think Google is better at AI - I am consistently surprised by how many random questions the Home can answer.
I can buy the argument that they are not as dedicated as Amazon when it comes to selling stuff via voice, but search via voice? They have been at it for like a decade already.
I tried multiple times playing Alexa, it doesn't come close to Google Home's voice recognition capabilities.
I do agree that they are dedicated to AI and voice and will make that central to their search offerings.
What I haven't seen from them is dedication to one particular version or variation of anything for more than a few years. It was Google Talk, then what Hangouts, and now Hello, which is also how you talk to bots, but if you want to talk to the Assistant, that's OK, Google.
I don't want hardware were the API is just shutdown because they 'retired' this and went on to something new.
The YouTube use-case sounds useful, particularly with Chromecast, and I wish I could do that with Alexa, but then giants must always butt heads.
As far as snips, I prefer to have more control of this type of solution, but building-your-own-airplane takes time that $50 on an Echo Dot does not. (Google had no similarly priced offering at that time.)