Instead they still keep focusing only on the "TV" part. I think they will miss a huge opportunity here, and like you said Apple will probably turn it into another blockbuster success a year from now, and Google will only then scramble to catch-up and do the same.
It baffles me how Google can't even get these pretty obvious "visions" sometimes. Even tablets should've been a pretty predictable market coming as a sort of upgrade from smartphones, and not how Microsoft tried to do it before with a full PC OS.
I'm sure Apple had the idea for years before the iPad launch, but the first "public" suggestion for such a thing I think was Mike Arrington's idea with the Crunchpad. I think it was 2008 when he started talking about it and getting people involved. Since then I myself started thinking that I would want a "tablet" rather than a mini-laptop/netbook in many situations (couch, bed, travelling, etc). But the iPad also seems to have caught Google completely off-guard back in 2010, as it took them a full year to even release a half-baked Honeycomb OS version.