I am not railing against diversity in the market. I like diversity and I am glad they released Google Drive. My response was to the parent questioning slightly more expensive alternatives, not to the piece of news itself.
As to your reply, as I was already mentioning, Google Storage itself was cheaper prior to Drive and I was using it for Picasa. I'm still on the old plan, paying a yearly $20 for 80 GB of storage (because I may use it for Docs and because I was too lazy to pull some photos out of Picasa).
You can always come up with a rationale like the Maps API and App Engine not being "consumer products", however Google is the only company I have a relationship with that increases prices instead of decreasing them and that takes away freebies. Amazon's AWS services are also not consumer products and they get cheaper over time. Amazon's freebies have a clear expiration date (like the 1-year free tier, which you know lasts for only 1 year, because it's in the freaking title).
Speaking of App Engine, they not only changed their prices, they changed their pricing scheme, breaking the original promise of the service. I could rail endlessly about how App Engine sucks, but that's for another discussion.
Speaking of Google Apps - you view it as a special offer. I view it as a broken promise, because they never mentioned that they are going to pull this option after releasing it.
First of all, I ended up saying to several small business owners "create an account on Google Apps, it's both free and awesome". Now their stuff is tied to Google Apps. For now their accounts are free, but you never know. They are also subject to Google's TOS, so they could get locked out of their accounts by a script that calculated a probability for TOS violations. I'm also bothered by the lock-in Google does with their @gmail.com email addresses they require for Google Accounts. Google Apps was a way out, even for normal users. Not anymore.