If VP8 is half as good as they claim, Google could make it a very serious competitor to H.264. They own the codec, they own YouTube, they have a web browser and a smartphone OS and they're coming out with Chrome OS before too long. They have leverage.

No hands-on experience, but VP6 was a pretty good codec - at least XviD/DivX/MPEG-4 level, and quite a bit better than Theora. If VP8 > VP6, and it was free, then it would definitely be worth using.