It depends on how you use them and what you use them for. But in general, yes.
So perhaps Google should start saying openly it's about the money, not about "openness" (which seems to be defined every week as something different by one company or another).
Once money/licensing is involved, it does become an issue of openness. Think of it as the letter of the spec versus the spirit of the spec.
If h.264 becomes the de facto standard for HTML5 video encoding, then a browser such as Firefox, or any free/open browser, will be financially unable to implement a completely standards compliant browser due to the cost of licensing.
Yes, one could supply other codecs to support the video tag since no codec is specified in the spec but if the majority of content out there is focused on h.264 then the effect is the same as not supporting the video tag at all.
So perhaps Google should start saying openly it's about the money, not about "openness" (which seems to be defined every week as something different by one company or another).