What guarantee is there that a codec which doesn't even exist yet won't lose to Microsoft/Cisco/Nokia/et al the next time we need to standardize a MTI codec in some spec? This seems wishful thinking.
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.