Awesome. There are only two things that really stand in the way of many HTML5 apps competing with native apps, camera access is one. Address book access is the other.

Before this only Opera 12 had experimental camera support.

I'm sure nothing bad will come of this.

Did you even read the article? It requires permission, just the same as existing Flash methods do.

This could be very, very interesting video conferencing and the like.

And there was never an exploit that allowed malicious websites access to your camera in flash...

https://www.google.com/search?q=flash%20camera%20exploit

...so how is it any worse than the current situation?

I assume it's going to use a sandbox. Plus it requires user permission.