Agreed, Gemini-cli is terrible compared to CC and even Codex.
But Google is clearly prioritizing to have the best AI to augment and/or replace traditional search. That's their bread and butter. They'll be in a far better place to monetize that than anyone else. They've got a 1B+ user lead on anyone - and even adding in all LLMs together, they still probably have more query volume than everyone else put together.
I hope they start prioritizing Gemini-cli, as I think they'd force a lot more competition into the space.