Bing does have a nice video/image search. I've never been terribly impressed by Google's algorithm for image search. I don't know how either algorithm works, but I get much better results from Bing, and the interface is very nice. I've always appreciate Google's very simple, informational interfaces, but I can't help but love the user-friendliness of Bing. It seems like they actually put a lot of thought into it.
Microsoft has the 500M to market it, and the who knows how many billions to build, and they already having paying advertisers. They know how to contact companies with big ad budgets... Not many other tech firms have all that in place, I don't think a startup could handle it. But then again, Google did it as a start up.
GoTo changed everything with text ads and Google was the first company to turn search into big business.
In other words, I agree with your larger point :)
ha hah, just kidding, I actually kind of like bing, and you know why? the nice pictures.
I wish they would show the pictures on the results page as well.
search results ain't bad either ;)