Doubt it. This isn't a big enough feature to be driven by that situation. It sounds like a routine product improvement to me.
I actually think it is. It'll make it harder to say "we're cheaper than aws". Now people will have to qualify that (we're cheaper than some of s3), which makes the statement much weaker.
Well, perhaps they have some corporate spies saying that Google will only store things twice to compete with S3 on cost. Probably not though.