Google to acquire Opera

Very interesting rumors about Google buying Opera. It would make perfect sense. Google's Local for Mobile midlet is a great app, and with the amount of Google apis available, I was wondering if it was just an enticement of what's to come from Google in the mobile web arena.
Opera's recent announcement about Enabling AJAX applications on mobile phones would suddenly allow Google to bring all it's cool services straight to the mobile desktop. Your Personalized Home could become the new idle screen on your phone, keeping you up-to-date the news/weather/rss etc. Gmail and Talk would be just a click away, and utilizing the WAP -push technology, could offer some real advantages over sms (think storage, searching, cost, etc). Moblogging, pod/video-casting could become much easier.
On top of all that Google would get a decent desktop browser and a leading mobile browser too. I am sure they could probably share a few ideas between the Google mobile proxy and the Opera Accelerator.
Of course, there is no reason Google can't do any of this on its own but as Carlo points out:
But keep in mind what are Opera's most significant relationships: deals to get its browser on handsets from some of the world's top mobile phone manufacturers. That would be instant traction for Google on some very big real estate.

We'll have to wait and see ....

--dean