"only" an encoder? It is quite big to have hardware encoding because that is where the bottleneck for real-time encoding is. Hence, if you were to choose between the encoder or decoder path, you would definitely focus on the encoder path first.

But it does look like VP8 has both paths now, which is kind-of nice. If Google plays this well, they give people all the reason for including a VP8 hardware decoder in new devices. I don't really buy the space-is-important argument as Moore's law still holds true for transistor counts.