All projects gate commits somehow. It's not about the gating, it's about who is allowed to make the big decisions and how much buy-in they need to seek from other stakeholders before they're allowed to proceed. It's also about incentives; if Linus were, say, a Verizon employee and if the Linux Foundation were a Verizon subsidiary, people would feel much differently about the governance of the kernel. Likewise if the kernel were permissively licensed rather than GPL'd.

> On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval?

The thrust of the point here is that forking the codebase is no good if you can't convince people to install the browser and for websites to support the browser. It's a social problem.

> is it not open "enough"?

It's not. Open source gives users the freedom to fork. When forking isn't enough to preserve user freedom, the next step is open governance, which involves delegating decision-making power to users (with many interesting structural varieties to choose from). Amusingly, I gave a speech on this topic at All Things Open just a month ago.