And with that the great mobile patent wars quiet down. I anticipate that Google will offer patent indemnity to its partners in short order. The public price is $12.5 billion, but given that MMI has $3B of cash on hand, it's really a $9.5B deal.

The various extortion and extinguishing rackets will disappear. I've seen some questionable analysis from the regular shills declaring that this changes nothing because Microsoft and Apple are both suing Motorola: Microsoft's suit was utter desperation (it could rightly have been called the "pretty pretty pretty please will you make Windows Phone devices?" suit), and Apple's suit came as a reaction to Motorola's lawsuit. Both have fizzed in the background, with minimal claims, and have in no way represented the apocalyptic all out patent warfare that comes.

Aside from the massive patent haul Google picked up, the other element of this purchase that holds opportunity is the PVR business: Motorola provides PVRs to a huge range of cable companies. These are powerful little media computers that tend to be seriously underutilized. They have ethernet ports and USB jacks, yet most act as nothing but dumb terminals.

There is so much potential there. The only hindrance has been the cable companies. Hopefully Google can provide some benefits that help that industry modernize.

This deal is unfortunate only in that it demotivates Google from their anti-patent quest. Now that they have a significant piece of the pie, at a hefty price tag, they'll be less inclined to argue in favor of much needed reform.

Update: Quite a few are noting, if not mocking, the similarities in the press statements by the various Android players. Of course they are coordinated. Does anyone think they didn't have a get together over the weekend to put on a common front? Does anyone think they didn't coordinate their response?

It would have been concerning if their responses were of the no comment, surprised sort. They weren't surprised.

What takes the award for the most hilarious response, however, is once again courtesy of Gruber.

Warm and glowing these remarks are not, and the sameness is a little creepy.

Warm and glowing? Should they have added smileys and hugs and kisses? They seemed like exactly the response I would anticipate.

As one aside, for a period today, and likely to repeat and then maintain, AAPL's market value was greater than double that of GOOG ($356B vs $177B).