The airline app offered a button to add the boarding pass to Google Wallet, I pressed the button (because airline apps are slow, and a local asset would be more reliable) and it appeared in Google Pay and everything went smoothly. The airport barcode scanner worked, the boarding gate scanner worked. More... the entry in Google Pay was updated with the gate number and notified me of the change, and the flight departure time was updated. Even the priority boarding is reflected on it which allowed me access to the first queue. Links from the boarding pass went to "Booking management" and also "Flight status detail".

It literally "just worked". It was intuitive too... I'd not seen it before and knew where to find everything.

I hadn't seen the functionality before (but haven't travelled in ages), and everything I would reasonably hope for from it was there working flawlessly. Even this morning when I looked at it I see it's moved into the "Expired passes" section as I would expect from a flight in the past.

Similar for the COVID pass in Google Pay... it was accepted at KubeCon, it was accepted at the Canadian border, it was accepted at the Spain border. Everything "just worked".

Google Wallet is likely fully implemented in the Google Pay app today, and the change is going to be a rebranding just to let people know you can do more than just pay for things. I don't work for Google or hold shares, all of this stuff is just me using the product as a user... it all works great for me, YMMV etc.