Interesting that they do this via partnerships with news outlets etc.
Last year they adapted search rankings to get everyone producing mobile-friendly pages. They could have done the same here. Great for getting the web forward, but it's a bit mafia like. "Nice 1st search result you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it...". I would like if it they used this again to get other things on everyone's prio list: IPv6, HTTP/2.0, page load time. It's a bit of a nuclear weapon, but it gets things moving.
More on topic: I have the strange feeling that AMP will somehow help them to "inline" the search results like they currently do with wikipedia etc.. That way your site becomes just a data source for Google, they're not actually driving traffic to it.