Isn't that any acqui-hire? The people who do the work are traded like cattle and usually don't get anything out of it. Worse, sometimes they did have equity in the company, but that's now traded for equity in the new company, but with a reset on the vesting time period.
Not if you just say no to startup equity offers for less than 1% of the company, but sadly there's one born every millisecond...
Good. You discovered a bit on how businesses work. In this case it ended little beneficial to many employees as instead of being laid off due to HTC downsizing or shutdown, they get to work for Google.
You say that like there's a surfeit of talent in tech. That's not the case in my experience. I do think there is an oversupply of fungibles though and companies seem to be adapting to that.
Perhaps the business unit wasn't doing well and the alternative may have been lost jobs?