Absolutely. I think the criticism is that Google has credibility amongst the tech community for 'openness', which is based on shrewd PR rather than them actually behaving differently to any other large corporation.
I see proponents of Google make arguments of the form:
"Google is open so we want them to win. Because we want Google to win, it's ok for them to keep things closed to give them an advantage."
Google is and remains primary a for profit company, which has to report to it's share holders. But they are better compared to others. They made large contributions to open source, for example Android and Chromium. Neither of the two are generating direct revenue for Google.
Also they choose to publish their map reduce, page rank and other algorithms, in the first place. I think if it were not for Google, there was no Hadoop. Also if Yahoo was the first to develop map reduce, I doubt they would have open sourced it either.
My point is overall Google's existence is beneficial for the opensource and tech community in general.
Why doesn't Apple get credit for their huge investment in Webkit which was crucial (by Google's own admission) for both Chromium and Android?
I'd argue that the difference in perception is down to PR. Apple does little to make itself look like a benign actor, whereas Google puts a lot of effort into associating itself with 'openness' (and other things like 'science'). I'm pretty sure that's intentional image making.
I see proponents of Google make arguments of the form:
"Google is open so we want them to win. Because we want Google to win, it's ok for them to keep things closed to give them an advantage."