what's keeping people with OpenAI for now is that chatGPT is free and GPT3.5 and GPT4 are the best. over time I expect the gap in performance to get smaller and the cost to run these to get cheaper.
if google gives me something close to as good as OpenAI's offering for the same price and it pull data from my gmail or my calendar or my google drive then i'll switch to that.
Ok, the first few times you use it maybe it's good to know it doesn't think it's a person, but short and sweet answers just save time, especially when the result is streamed.
People use "the chatbot from OpenAI" because that's what became famous and got all the world a taste of AI (my dad is on that bandwagon, for instance). There is absolutely no way my dad is going to sign up for an Anthropic account and start making API calls to their LLM.
But I agree that it's a weak moat, if OpenAI were to disappear, I could just tell my dad to use "this same thing but from Google" and he'd switch without thinking much about it.