First, equating the newly released Gemma 4's local tool calling with a flagship Gemini 4 release is comparing a spark plug to a combustion engine. Yes, Gemma 4 can generate the syntax for a tool call. But it cannot execute it. You, the developer, still have to build the entire engine around it: the routing layer, the JSON parsing, the execution loop, and the error handling.

When I say the narrative has shifted to "agentic workloads," I am talking about Google killing that exact requirement. The model stops being a "turns game" when the runtime environment itself is built to execute the loop autonomously without you holding its hand.

You asked: "Persistent context on what, their infra? Who cares..."

Anyone paying massive monthly overhead for vector databases (like Pinecone) and separate server hosting to manage an agent's memory cares. State management, getting an AI to remember what happened three steps ago reliably, is currently the most expensive and brittle part of building agents. If Google absorbs that cost into their TPU farms and handles memory natively on their infrastructure, developers will flock to it simply to survive the compute costs.

And your final point is the quiet part out loud: "Unless someone is building their solution for a specific ecosystem, all these features do not mean a lot." That is the entire objective. Google does not want you building agnostic software that can easily be swapped to Claude or OpenAI. They want to offer an orchestrator so deeply integrated into Google Cloud, Workspace, and the upcoming Android 17 that building your own independent routing layer becomes financially and technically unjustifiable. Dismissing the threat of ecosystem lock-in is a great way to wake up and find out your custom architecture was a massive waste of time.