They clearly intended for Skia to be accelerated by something, but it never actually happened. PixelFlinger and libagl also look a lot like an early version of OpenGL, but were never actually accelerated either.
The big disruption was the 2.0 version of OpenGL ES. Most of its power lies in its shading language and there was no straightforward way to exploit that through Skia. ICS was really a major re-design where they abandoned Skia to use OpenGL ES 2.0 instead - with all it's GLSL capabilities.
They also badly needed the improved support for FBOs in 2.0. It is the basis of the new TextureView and VideoView classes.
It's also important that over 99% of all Android devices now have OpenGL ES 2.0 acceleration. For an example of how they exposed GLSL to the Canvas API in ICS, take a look at the Effects class.