HTML5 video is DOA and Google might as well lay the groundwork for the next round. Major content providers don't support HTML5 video. Netflix, Hulu, and anyone else with intellectual property to protect want nothing to do with it. So we're going to need to keep our proprietary plugins and our proprietary apps through the HTML5 era. Even YouTube needs to stay proprietary.
So if HTML5 video is DOA, why support h264? Why be democratic when people are going to use Flash and Silverlight anyway? At least this way there might be a real push for the standard HTML5 video codec to be free and open source.