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.
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
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.