Software is far, far, cheaper than hardware. Building bespoke hardware for a tiny fraction of your customer base is insanely expensive, because the larger players have sewn up all the component orders. Once you build your hardware you are stuck with it forever. There is no "Day 1" patch for hardware.
If you needed further evidence you only have to look at the number of hardware Kickstarter projects that fail miserably because they grossly underestimated the cost and complexity of actually making a physical thing.
1) Google is an advertising company. They're not good at making products. If they were, they'd have a lot more profit come from places other than AdSense. They have literally dozens of products, and very few of them impact the bottom line. Clearly they do need to figure out what people want.
2) Dev Tools in Chrome is a way to get developers to target Chrome. This means Chrome is going to work better when browsing than other browsers.
3) Google has so much engineering bandwidth that Dev Tools is a tiny investment. It was useful enough (at the time it was released) to keep it entirely internal, honestly. Letting the public use it was just gravy.
4) Web developers are far, far more common than people who need to use SSH from a phone. Not all developers use SSH and not all developers have a reason to use it from a phone.
To that end, they've always been very vested in improving web development for everyone.