Google TV is more like a platform for TV manufacturers to take advantage of. In the same way that Android is a developing platform for smart phones, Google TV is a developing platform for televisions (Google TV is actually based on the Android operating system).
It provides a lot of the standard features that many users have come to expect from their increasingly connected electronics. These features include:
- A full featured web browser (Chrome) that can access nearly all the same web sites that you can access from your computer
- Flash support (for streaming video like YouTube/Hulu, interactive games/software, and other Flash related content)
- Many core system services (e.g., remote control interface, keyboard interface, networking, file storage, etc.)
- Probably a large library of extensions to enable/enhance even more capabilities (e.g., email, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, media sharing/streaming, etc.)
Compared to most current generation TV sets, this would represent a significant step up in the internet access department. This can turn the TV into a highly functional standalone platform for the most common web browsing, email, and video streaming tasks. Instead of relying on set-top boxes, media center PCs, or standalone PCs/laptops for these tasks, many of them can be done directly on the TV itself.
Since many of these features are taken care of by the Google TV platform, this frees up the TV manufacturers to concentrate on other aspects of their products (e.g., display technology, image processing, 3D processing, sound systems, user interface/preferences/customization, maybe even VoIP/webcam/teleconferencing).