So if you want to get better quality than VP8 out of H.264 on the web you need to either lose hardware acceleration or get different hardware (I'm not sure how much of this can be done with the existing hardware and different firmware, and how much actually needs new hardware; the parts of H.264 non-baseline that are not hardware accelerated are the more complicated ones, obviously).
Of course VP8 also requires changes to the decoding hardware/firmware; I also can't tell you whether those changes would be such that the result would be able to handle non-baseline H.264.
But the upshot is that current VP8 video on the web can easily be higher quality per bit than current H.264 video on the web, because the latter is self-constrained by hardware support and the former is not worrying about it for the moment, since it's not there anyway.
All of which is a far cry from "VP8 is much better". ;)
If you read Dark Shikari's analysis carefully, he says that VP8 is better than H.264 Baseline Profile.
As it happens, H.264 Baseline Profile is all that the "hardware acceleration" in most mobile devices handles (see http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/05/its_a_re... ).
So if you want to get better quality than VP8 out of H.264 on the web you need to either lose hardware acceleration or get different hardware (I'm not sure how much of this can be done with the existing hardware and different firmware, and how much actually needs new hardware; the parts of H.264 non-baseline that are not hardware accelerated are the more complicated ones, obviously).
Of course VP8 also requires changes to the decoding hardware/firmware; I also can't tell you whether those changes would be such that the result would be able to handle non-baseline H.264.
But the upshot is that current VP8 video on the web can easily be higher quality per bit than current H.264 video on the web, because the latter is self-constrained by hardware support and the former is not worrying about it for the moment, since it's not there anyway.
All of which is a far cry from "VP8 is much better". ;)