I don't think that this is about Apple. It is about web standards and pushing for a uniform web.

Good point, but pushing web standards if it hurts your business case isn't smart. Standards & nice things for developers aren't always in the best interest of companies. Apple doesn't want users to be able to create iOS Apps with Adobe's software -- because these Apps would run on every device and that would destroy their competitive advantage. Software independent of hardware was a great invention, allowing Microsoft to earn buckets of $$$ -- but that wasn't in the best interest of IBM. They had to change their focus from hardware to services to survive.

I think there was an interesting post about these kind of mechanisms on http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ but I can't find it anymore.

I believe their primary incentive is to easily convert flash ads for their advertising partners to HTML5 so they can be displayed on mobile as well.

As the above comment points out, this mainly works for Flash 5 content, so we are looking at mainly simple animations. The way I see it is that this is all about Flash-like banner ads onto iOS, which is an area that Google makes a huge amount of money from.

Anything that makes the web better is a win for Google.

This isn't a zero-sum game. Apple doesn't need to lose for Google to win.