So the move to GitHub by Google's open source code is the next step? I kept hearing from people "in the know" that moving to GitHub was a real possibility a long time ago.

The "move" started a couple years ago. I open-sourced a Google project about 18 months ago and the recommended hosting solution was GitHub:

https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser

(Ironically, when posted on Hacker News, one of the first comments was that it was ironic that it was posted to GitHub and not Google Code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210282