I can never understand why Google buries this feature further and further down on their site. At one point "products" was featured up top and made it quick and easy to switch between web and product searches. Worse it seems more and more they aren't worried about applying any type of standards. Some items I search for the prices are blatantly wrong - the starting price is listed as $10 for example but is actually $25, other sites aren't even ecommerce enabled as required...in short it reduces the functionality and it doesn't seem that Google has much interest at this stage in their product. Are others finding this as well, or is it industry specific? The Google blog clearly indicates prices must be listed as a customer is able to buy at the minimum quantity and that they must be able to purchase from the landing page, yet that doesn't ever seem to be enforced.
I certainly hope it has a future. I really like and use google product search. I would think that with the the big push of google payments that base would be something G would want to nourish, not abandon. I've found several great deals through google product search and I really hope it continues. I've done a lot of work on my end to get my products formatted well for google base and while I can't see it brings a lot of traffic, it does bring some and some is better than none. I just click a link in my shopping cart which generates the xml for me to copy and upload to google. I do it every three weeks to keep the products up to date.
I am also sure Google Base will have a future. We do get lots of clicks and conversions from Google's Product-Searchengine. Formating the products is tiresome indeed, but in the end it pays off.