(Image courtesy of Businessweek.com)

There may be plenty of people in the media who feel that battle lines are being drawn between Google and Apple, but apparently the folks at Google don’t feel the same way.

Reuters is reporting that a senior executive at Google has denounced the rumors today in Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress trade show. The response from Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile engineering, comes amidst recent rumors that Apple will replace Google as the default search engine on the iPhone with Microsoft’s Bing.

“Apple is a very close and valuable partner and we’re very excited about the relationship we have with them today,” Gundotra said. “We have no reason to believe that’s going to change.”

Of course, journalists being what they are, Gundotra was pressed further on the Bing search rumors. “We don’t want to comment on those rumors,” he stated succinctly. “We think that relationship is stable.”

The iPhone wasn’t all that the Google exec was cornered about at MWC. The question of a second Google-branded cell phone (dubbed in the press as the “Nexus Two”) was raised, with the prospect of it being aimed at enterprise customers. Gundotra had nothing new to say on the matter, claiming that “no decisions had been made yet” about how many Google phones there would be or who might manufacture them.

“We just haven’t made those decisions yet,” Gundotra said in response to the Nexus Two question. “We decided to take the flagship phones, the best phones that were available, and those would have Google branding.”

Manufacturer HTC of Taiwan provided the hardware for the co-branded Nexus One unveiled in early January, which was the first time that the search giant had lent its brand to a consumer hardware product.