GPT-4 is restricted to paying users, and is notable for how slow it is, whereas Bard is free to use, widely available (and becoming more so), and relatively fast.
In other words, if Google had a GPT-4 quality model I'm not sure they would ship it for Bard as I think the cost would be too high for free use and the UX debatable.
They both represent SOTA of two firms trying for technically the same thing. Just because the models or the infrastructure aren't identical doesn't mean we should not be comparing those to the same standards. Where Bard gains in speed and accessibility, it looses in reasoning and response quality.
Bard is more directly comparable to ChatGPT as a product in general, and since it doesn’t have swappable models, comparing it to the opt-in paid-only model isn’t really a direct comparison.
Even if Bard were targeting accuracy, it'd still fall short of ChatGPT, but much less so than it does now. (That said, as a product strategy it's questionable: at some point, which I think Bard reaches, the loss in quality makes it more trouble than it's worth.)
The OpenAI strategy here then seems like a no brainer.
Google's mistake is in thinking that ChatGPT was a maximally useful product at high cost. Right now, ChatGPT is a useful product at a high cost which is nonetheless the lowest possible cost for a useful model.
ChatGPT also spouts falsehoods and makes mistakes on non-trivial problems, there is not much difference here. Both have enough issues that you have to be very careful with them, especially when building a product that will be user facing
(Snapshot of the page at the time this comment was written: https://archive.is/hScBl )
I get the general point, but I would say that "everywhere but the EU" is very much "widely available".