Whats a bit wild to me is Google's only selling point for their Pixel phones are increasingly Gemini.

Now that you can get Gemini, operated by Apple (with the Apple privacy features that come along with that), why would you ever consider going Android/Pixel (outside of running GrapheneOS, but I'm talking regular consumers here)?

Google isn't even making anything on the deal with Apple. They pay $20B/year to be the default search engine. This is Apple just giving a $1B a year discount to that to be able to license Gemini.