That's a fair point but it looks like it is in chromium.

much harder to tell at a glance what each app is

Is that a Google launcher issue? I'm using Nova Launcher and my apps are still all different colors, the app icons don't use the material you color.

Pretty sure the answer is: Yes, since I believe it's part of the open source project chromium, it would be under the same open source license.

set -o vi

Using their own new protocol that no one else uses and they probably don't even implement themselves yet.