You can already have an always-on third party VPN that has nothing to do with Google.
This is just a feature that was on some phones that's rolled out to the base OS now. It's opt in AFAICR, there's a prompt to enable it when you first boot the phone.
Auto-connects you to high quality open WiFi and secures your connection with a VPN back to Google."
Let's hope the VPN can be set to non-Google too, or it's optional or opt-out feature.