I thought this was always the point of Gears, as a stopgap for HTML5 features until browsers supported them all. But I don't really see why they need Gears on Firefox for local storage for example, when Firefox has had a local storage API since version 2.
There was a similar article based on (I think) the Mac chrome bug tracker. Basically Gears stopped working and the Google developer said, in the future they were supporting native HTML5.
This shouldn't be a surprise as in the past they've said Gears is just a way to get HTML5 into browsers that wouldn't otherwise support it.
See https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Storage
Of course, I am not really a web developer or a Google employee so I probably don't have the whole picture.
Oh, I guess the Firefox 2 storage isn't actually HTML5 storage, according to http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/html5.html#localstorage . But then, I don't quite understand where that lies in relation to HTML5.