Google’s open-source Android and Chrome is taking the leap from the small screen to your home theatre in a big way.

The Official Google Blog today announced that Google TV is indeed a reality, and will be coming to a wide range of devices this fall (hopefully in time for the new TV season!). The search behemoth describes the service as “TV meets web, web meets TV” and has enlisted a host of hardware partners to make its television ambitions a reality.

“Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet,” the Google blog reveals. “With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV -- it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because a wide range of companies have been trying to make this dream come true, including our beloved Apple, Inc. with their often-neglected Apple TV device. Google TV is built on the company’s existing Android and Google Chrome technology, and a Google TV SDK and accompanying web APIs will be released to developers shortly after the product launches; in the meantime, developers are encouraged to start optimizing their websites for the service today.

Google partners Sony and Logitech are on board to help bring Google TV to televisions everywhere, in addition to Blu-ray players and companion boxes. Google TV-enabled hardware devices will go on sale this fall at Best Buy stores nationwide, and at least one satellite provider, Dish Network, is already on board to provide the technology to its customers as well. In the meantime, you can sign up online to get more updates as they become available.

The real question now is, how will Apple respond to yet another new threat from Google to one of their business models, even if the Apple TV is still considered just “a hobby”? Your move, Cupertino…