I agree that Google were too slow to move, but entirely disagree with the first part. ChatGPT is very much not a "search engine". Arguably it is an "Answer engine", but more so, it is a conversational partner - I almost never use ChatGPT to just get one response; the real benefit is being able to follow up with it until I'm satisfied. It's an entirely different medium of interaction as compared to search engines.

GPT is orders of magnitude more expensive to run, though.