Theoretically, anticipating an antitrust case might lead you to be equally cautious, in roughly the same way, as having recently gotten an antitrust case.

Though things that "demonstrated that they ... have too much power" sound like some of the worst things you could do if you were anticipating an antitrust case.

Android/iOS is a different beast, as they both have decent shares of the market; if you don't like Safari being bundled with iOS you can always buy an Android phone. That seems to be the reasoning behind it anyway.

Mind you, Windows has a smaller market share of the personal computing market today, compared to when the anti-trust cases were settled. I suspect that with Apple's currently higher market share and the fact that browsers are available on phones, pads and other devices, those settlements would have ended up differently.

Google and other big IT corpos seem to be operating under the assumption that government action is harmless. At most they get a moderate fine, which they can delay in courts for years, and then keep operating with minor alterations.

This won't change until there is actual legislation or they are threatened with being broken.

Having a browser engine in an OS makes sense from a third party developer point of view - if I want my app to run on all windows/Mac/iOS/android/whatever systems without bundling WebKit, having a browser libs guaranteed to be on $target is really helpful.