That was my initial thought too, but looks like these lambdas have to derive from a specific set of Lambda base images. Cloud Run lets your publish ANY docker container from any base image. So this feels much more like a deployment and development feature of Lambdas and not "run any container as a Lambda"
Not entirely. This is something we've been thinking about for years now and is really about tooling and developer workflow. That is where the biggest benefit is for this.
One small note - Cloud Run is KNative as a service. Lambda is divorced from Kubernetes.
Personal opinion - I prefer Lambda over KNative. KNative feels like more of a shoehorn into Kubernetes than most other projects. Lambda feels more mature.
There are two versions of Cloud Run. The fully-managed cloud-only variant is actually an API skin over Google App Engine. The "for Anthos" (née "for GKE") variant is Knative[0] in both API and sourcecode.
AWS could plausibly do exactly the same thing: provide a skin over Lambda that speaks Knative.
I think Amazon's and Microsoft's reluctance to wade into Knative has been wariness about Google's intentions. And maybe 6 months ago I would have said "fair enough, I would be cautious too". But the recent update to Knative's governance model largely resolves the problem, in my view. I would very much like to see AWS and MS involvement.
[0] "Knative" is the correct spelling, FWIW.
Disclosure: I work for VMware, which participates in Knative development.
