I put money down with a buddy (when Google+ launched) that within a year Google would drop the Google+ brand. This article basically agrees with me, but has it backwards.

Google+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the "+".

(They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).