On: Google to release Google Gears on Thursday - take applications beyond the web and challenge Microsoft on desktop

There's some ways to get megs of storage on the client using Flash and other things (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2007/01/ajax-performance-local-storage.html) to store a few megs of content locally. I wonder why they didn't go with that, in order to avoid the plugin?