Could Apple be preparing a competitor to Google Voice?

Information on Google Voice is a little tricky to come by if you are outside the US; when you visit their website you get a brief, uninformative description and a login box but as soon as they work out that you are not in the US you get a nice message telling you that you are not in the US and that the service is unavailable. That means that, in the UK at least, Google Voice has a very low profile; it sounds like a really neat service that would have huge benefits for people who travel or who work from more than one location (which is pretty much everyone I know) but there's no way to be sure.

So what makes me think that Apple might be preparing an alternative? Three things:
1) It sounds very much like the sort of service that Apple might like to offer; it is a potentially complex service that offers opportunities for convergence between mobile and desktop hardware where exceptional design skills could deliver noticeable advantages over Google's offering.
2) Apple's rejection of the Google Voice for iPhone app might be seen as part of a long game that will end with the launch of an Apple iVoice product.
3) Apple's enormous new data centre, believed to be the power behind the rumoured iTV product, may also be intended as a base for an iVoice service.

This is all very thin and highly speculative, but from what I've heard of Google Voice an Apple alternative could be a really attractive service. We wait for news.