Most likely it was noted because several of us probably immediately wondered why google would have taken it upon themselves to release a new version of something they weren't the maintainer of.

Google has as much incentive as anyone else to introduce a faster wire protocol. The article mentions the Chrome project, and don’t forget that Google Cloud has a git-repo-hosting product.

That's true, and while we all get to enjoy the new protocol, it seems like its primary beneficiary will be big organizations that have gigantic repos with massive numbers of refs in them. Furthermore, there's a clear orientation towards specialization -- putting that giant repo on a central server. Google clearly stands to benefit more from this work than those of us who use git as a distributed version control system. Who pays the piper calls the tune.