Indeed, open source helps a lot. It is amazing how far KHTML has gotten. But still, no standards would mean no Opera, no Mozilla, no any other entrants to the game.
Anyway, this article prompted me to switch from Chrome to Aurora on my Android tablet. Feels good so far...
Not necessarily, it would still be possible for them to embed webkit or even to re-implement it.
Webkit would simply become the reference implementation.
If WebKit becomes the standard, every user from now until forever will be using the same pile of C++ to browse. That may be fine to you; I personally don't think that WebKit is so good as to make it the gold standard for the Web. Imagine if that had happened with NCSA Mosaic...
Surely anybody else could even fork webkit if they so desired.
Having one pile of C++ to browse beats having multiple piles of C++ all with their own bugs an eccentricities.