Google gears trying to play catch up with Adobe AIR

Is Google Gears (an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript API) a competitor to Adobe AIR? According to the google website http://gears.google.com/
It will let you:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Hmm let's hope the competition helps improve AIR even more!