I've watched an overview of OneSwarm, "a privacy-preserving P2P client developed at the University of Washington" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneSwarm)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVrnIXnENHw

I was wondering how such a service could compete with Google's model of cloud computing, and even complete it.

What if a company implements this technology inside Chromium OS so that we can access data from personal and friends' devices trough a Web browser? Could we benefit from the cloud without the usual privacy issues?

Should Google bundle such a service with its browser/OS to guarantee that choosing Chromium doesn't require to depend fully on any company's cloud? This may be utopian, but since many users think of the Google's cloud both as a great solution and a huge threat for their privacy and independence, Google would remove the biggest obstacle for the adoption of Chromium OS and Google Apps adoption while preventing their competitors from locking users in their cloud.

What do you think of these ideas, ideally and practically?

Google doesn't want distributed. They want centralized. That way they can access and analyze all of our data, and get paid to offer us access to it. They want to make things incredibly convenient for us, but that unfortunately sacrifices some degree of privacy.

I do hope that distributed technologies such as this will become more prevalent, but being a publicly traded company, Google will never be working 100% in our interests.