The telco industry is also a very different business from what they are used too for a couple reasons. First, google's current offerings need little in the way of direct customer support. They don't need banks of people to answer phones and calm down irrate customers. In fact, many of their services are free, so if it's down, "oh well." That is very different from a phone company where they always need a plethora of support staff just to placate the irrate calls of their customers.
The telco's also have stringent restrictions because they have to meet FCC rules and they are public utilities so they have to meet the restrictions of cities, counties, and states or face stiff fines. There is a lot of liability there.
If the rumors are true, while there is a lot of money to be made in the phone industery, I really doubt the industry is a good fit for Google and that peoples bad feelings for telco's might rub off on Googles other products.
The only thing I think that might be cool out of this is the possible merging of technologies. Imagine having an password protected webpage with your contact info for friends. Like normal you could click on the e-mail address and and your mail client pops up. Or an IM link. But now you could have a phone number link, where people click on the phone number and their phone rings, they pick it up, and then it automatically dials that friends number they clicked. Possibly with the ability to do this from home with your hope phone or from your cell phone. You would just need to work out osme way for the Google webserver to relate where you are connecting from to what phone to access.