As Monty himself put it on his personal blog, in the matter of VP8 vs. H264, VP8 lost. This is an appreciated measure by Cisco to mitigate the damage until Daala can be fielded to proactive displace whatever MPEG LA tries to push after H264.
On a purely technical level, Opus' performance blew the pants off the other options, which surely helped. If Daala can repeat that performance I think they have a good chance.
Surely, the argument is going to come around in 2015 or whenever Daala ships that H264/H265 hardware is too widely deployed on billions of mobile devices to justify a new codec.
Does Cisco really want to WebRTC to succeed when it clearly commodifies their WebEx offering? The question is, what are they getting by ensuring H264 is MTI?
What Mozilla and Google were going to get out of VP8 winning was pretty clear. So one has to ask what their motivation is for spending so much money to keep H264 as MTI.