That's exactly what they are doing, although perhaps for two-fold reasons. More recent versions of Android move more and more core stuff into the Play services.

That's exactly what they are doing, although perhaps for two-fold reasons. More recent versions of Android move more and more core stuff into the Play services. This enables Google to push updates to core services like normal app updates. It also ensures that a lot of core APIs are covered by services only available on phones licensed with Google.