It even self-updates, so in some sense it's already ahead of the standard linux distributions!
I read this as "prototype".
And they did all the "from scratch" work. It would be short sighted to not let zircon at least have the potential to replace Linux.
Apple vertical integration strategy recently took a big step forward and googles response may well be this.
We should judge on what has been finished rather than what has been started. After people start to work with it, that's when the real costs will start to be incurred.
Apple are an interesting case in that they have done this very very gradually over many many years - building on top of existing tried and tested platforms where possible.
Google seem to be dominant in android/mobile despite their crappy OS. Whether they're threatened or not, this does need to be improved. This may or may not be due to Linux - to me it seems to be more the case that it's again their failure to stick to things that's the most frustrating aspect of using Android - but maybe using Linux means they spend more development time doing that than dealing with features. Perhaps they're just trying to emulate Apple's strategy alá cargo cult.