Google itself has reportedly been for ages -- in fact, the "almost ready" rumor just this afternoon (no coincidence, I'm sure). But in this game, timing is everything. If you upload 50 gigs of music -- or, heck, even 5 gigs of music -- to a remote server, you're probably not going to bother uploading it to some other server six months later. The longer Google waits, the larger advantage Amazon gains. Unless Google comes up with some major incentive to pull people in, users snatched up by Amazon may end up being users lost.

One last point to consider: What's still missing in the Android ecosystem? A simple one-stop place to shop for video content and have it beamed directly onto your device. And what company has the means to provide such a service, complete with its own ready-to-go payment system? You guessed it: Amazon. If Amazon really wants to rule the realm of Android multimedia shopping, we all know what it'll do next.

Finally, here's the best part of all this for us as consumers: You can bet that Amazon's competitors aren't going to let anyone take the throne as Android's content leader without one hell of a fight. And that means we're bound to see tons of cool new multimedia services, features, and pricing models over the next several months -- from third-party companies, for sure, and probably from Google as well. Competition forces everyone to step up their game and fight for our loyalty, and as users, that's exactly what we want to see.

Things are about to get very interesting.

JR Raphael is a PCWorld contributing editor and the author of the blog. You can find him on both and .