Some of that, sure. But realistically, a lot people are just don't want to pay for every frontier model provider out there as they're released. Not just money, but also time trying them out. (Recommend people at least try out their multimodal model.)
It doesn't help that Google offers a bunch of confusing plans in multiple places. I ended up just pasting all their AI plan URLs, at least that I could find, into Claude so I didn't have to figure it out.
I pay for Google Workspace, so pretty much the Gemini Pro included with that suffices my use case. I can't say it will work for everyone, but I do use it for random tasks - all the way from wood working to building complex software projects, and so far I've rarely hit the limit too.
I guess it's access to Gemini, because that's the plan I'm on and you can access Gemini using gemini.google.com or their phone app (Android/iOS). I couldn't find information on the API, maybe it's on that page, but I couldn't find it from my phone browser. Anyway, I use OpenRouter pretty much, so I have no idea if the API is part of my plan.
It doesn't help that Google offers a bunch of confusing plans in multiple places. I ended up just pasting all their AI plan URLs, at least that I could find, into Claude so I didn't have to figure it out.