Called Google Offers, the service is launching (in beta form) to Portland, Oregon and will expand to San Francisco, Oakland/East Bay and New York City’s downtown, midtown and uptown areas.
Google Offers will compete with existing services like Groupon or LivingSocial, featuring the same local-deal-of-the-day-for-a-limited-time formula that made those other services successful.
Aside from the very limited number of locations, I see one glaring potential issue with Google Offers. Pretty much everyone who would be interested in the whole daily deals concept has likely already aligned themselves with the other services. This means that the potential target audience has shrunk quite a bit since Google started developing this service back in January.
So although I feel Google is more than a little late to the daily deals party, we'll have to wait for the full launch to better judge whether or not Google is making us an offer we can't refuse.