Google To Launch Database Web Service Using BigTable?

TechCrunch got it from a source that Google plans to launch their BigTable, their proprietary internal database which is used for Google Search, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB Web Service.

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers at Google. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products.
via TechCrunch

Can Google maintain its tradition of providing free products with Google Web Service? I doubt it.