The Home Mini has been $20 several times (inc. black Friday), $80 for three at Costco, or nearly free (e.g. spend $125 on Google Express right now and get one included). I paid only $64 for my Google Home for example (new from eBay).
My point is, if you follow deal sites Google has had back to back sales almost since they launched. The $50/$130 prices for the Mini/Home respectively are largely fiction.
So yes, it doesn't hurt. In fact, it quite clearly helps a ton.
Does that make them pound for pound competitive with one another? No of course not. But consumers are not necessarily buying one or the other on a price basis. Alexa got there earlier. Google has to do something to overcome that hurdle.. being practically free or getting stuffed into something else for free is a successful way to overcome.
Now imagine coming into this arena with none of those integrations. Your system can answer some questions about the weather. It can tell you that your Imap mail account has 3 new messages. Everything else, you've got to do the engineering work yourself to integrate, while Google and Amazon just publish APIs.
I think you could argue Walmart was primarily competing with mom and pop stores a decade ago (though really other large supermarkets at that point), but they are most certainly competing with amazon today.
People would suddenly start to care if the entity enjoys a large enough market share to make them a monopoly.
Interestingly Amazon seems to be staying out of that end. I wonder if they are waiting it out - Echo was kind of a surprise success originally after all.
The line literally wrapped around the block in Hayes Valley.
You're the product. They sell everything you say, the microphone never turns off.