Exactly -- you'll occasionally hear people say things like "Google is basically keeping Firefox afloat" -- sure, it's a massive contract that does fund Mozilla almost entirely, but any of the other major search engines would love a chance to be the default install option. Think about what that would do for Bing.
I agree but I feel like the backfire issue is never brought up. If Bing becomes default, would less techy users just switch back to Chrome? I hope not.
Surely this kind of back and forth must have happened during the last Google/Mozilla negotiation over their search engine contract, but it's a situation where while both sides will try to posture within the understood wiggle room [1], they both know that they have a lot to lose by coming to a fall out.
