The job is for a Senior Video Conferencing Engineer, and suddenly a lot of things make more sense. Skype users particularly scorned Google Talk for it's lack of softphone ability or the other bells and whistles of AIM and Yahoo.
However, maybe chasing existing products wasn't the point - maybe Google is going for Gold: despite numerous attempts, nobody has really managed to get video conferencing to take off in the mainstream, and perhaps Google thinks it's the man for the job?
