Some are characterizing Google’s big Honeycomb announcement yesterday as the “first shot across Apple’s bow,” which seems a bit odd to us: iOS and Android devices have been at war for over two years. Upon consideration, though, maybe they’re right. In some fields of the battle, Android seemed to be forgetting to fire, or to have its guns jammed, or to be not totally sure where the bow was.

One of those fields was the Android Market. When we finished work on a cross-platform native mobile app last year, we naturally wanted to assemble promotional materials, including links that would allow interested readers to purchase the app. We easily located the relevant page on the Apple App Store website, and then went to find the corresponding page on the Android Market site, where it… wasn’t.

In fact, the Android Market site was barely a placeholder, with a list of a few “top” app lists and no ability to search or view details, much less make purchases. From a company like Google, whose mission is to make the world’s information easily accessible on the Web, it was a startling omission. We spent some time checking to make sure we weren’t missing something, but no: Android applications, it seemed, were only to be discovered on one’s Android phone.

That seems to have finally changed. The new Android Market is an actual functioning storefront, with categories, screenshots and details of every app available, plus Google’s typically excellent search. It’s even got a key feature that the Apple store lacks: you can click to download an app on the site and have it sent to your device immediately, without needing to use the Market app or sync to your computer. Over-the-air syncing is an area where Google has a clear advantage over Apple, as demonstrated by the laborious process of importing and exporting iWork documents versus the simple “it’s already everywhere” philosophy of Google Docs.

Google has surely been hard at work on Android Market behind the scenes, no doubt spurred on by Amazon’s upcoming rival Android store as much as by Apple. Android’s apps and downloads skew even harder toward “free” than those on iOS, and if Google is going to transform it into a genuine revenue engine rather than just a loss leader for ad sales, the newly functional Market is an important step.