The PC Advisor reports that Google plans to extend its search results to give Google Base (read more) results also:

Google plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season.

[...] When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, according to Bear Stearns & Co analysts.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service.

That is, if your company places information about "widgets for sale" into Google Base (with price, picture and description information), people searching for "widgets" on Google will be given the option of seeing the "for sale" results.

The Read/Write web believes this will pose a problem for microformats; I'm not so sure -- microformats are a way of specifying structured data elements in a web page in a formal and open way. Google Base is a proprietary database run by Google Corp -- if you can create the data to go in the latter, you should have no trouble publishing it for the former.