Their hardware is nowhere near Nvidia, hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.