As far as I recall (and can discern from the information that's out there), it was Adobe who pulled it from the Android market / Play store (I forget which it was called at the time) - Google had little to do with it. Adobe decided to cease development on mobile Flash Player rather than release a version for Jelly Bean, and flipped the switch to prevent new installs (claiming that "unpredictable behaviour" was likely on JB).
As for the original topic of this thread, some kind of core media capture API would be great. For quite a while now, I've been wanting to rebuild my Flash audio recording widget as an HTML interface with HTML5 and Flash backends (sorry, I'm not going to go near Java!) - but I just haven't had the time to so much as get started on it. That said, the longer it's left, the more likely that all the building blocks (GetUserMedia, Media Capture API) will be in place in enough browsers to make it really worthwhile.
-Paul