“Futuristic New Router” … a.k.a. catching up to industry standards, after several years of a sub-standard router. Definitely one of the weakest points in Angular thus far.
Regarding Angular’s future (vs. X or Y competing framework)… there’ll always be new frameworks. React is hot right now, because it gave us the virtual DOM. Aurelia is hot because it introduces some other new stuff. In 2016, even newer frameworks will emerge … and they will also push the needle forward.
It’s hard for any framework to keep up (hence why Angular 2.0 is essentially a complete rewrite). Folks inevitably jump to newer, hotter ones. Remember Ext JS? SproutCore? YUI? They were prescient for their time, but inevitably grew stale and untenable.
The fact that Angular is maintained by Google means nothing. A team of 100 people can vanish in a day, if some exec decides to put their priorities elsewhere. Frankly, Google derives more benefit from Angular as a recruiting tool (to hire talented UI engineers) than anything else.