What are you talking about? Japanese? I must be missing something. And when Chrome was released, I downloaded it and used it with every site I could think of with no problems. Google talks about testing as many web sites as possible to ensure compatibility with them, most likely in the comic that I still suggest you look through. Honestly, I would love to hear your opinion on it.
Clearly you are for two giant browser organizations taking over the internet, and again I suggest that having choice is a wonderful thing. To be blunt, I think that your phrase "muddies the waters" is completely meaningless and doesn't hold water, regardless of one's viewpoint, because browsers and sites should be addressing a set of standards. I've heard many say that IE was a nightmare for developers because it refused to play that game, which knocks one of the big 2 right off the chart.
Perhaps times have changed, but there's no way in hell that everyone using one browser is the best way to go about things. That's why there are multiple operating systems to use on our computers, and why there are multiple video editing programs, and multiple choices for everything. There will never be one program that can get it all right, because there will never exist a society in which everyone desires the same thing. I respect Google for offering up a browser to give people more choices, and I'll use it because I agree with the ideals they put forth in their comic.

I don't think anyone is saying we need a one or two browser world, just that we didn't really need yet another browser when we already have IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. Additionally, since Google already was supporting the development of Firefox, why did they need to create their own browser to compete with Firefox, when they could have just implemented their "improvements" within Firefox? The whole evolution of Chrome seems kind of sketchy to me, especially for a company that has the mission statement "don't be evil". I'm strongly reminded of a day back in the mid 80's when a certain Mr. Gates visited a certain Mr. Jobs and stole all his company's ideas for an operating system...
On top of that, the browser they released is really not that good, regardless of what their stated goals were with the final product. You may not have had any issues with the websites you visited, but the only sites I was guaranteed to have no problems with were Google's own; any others and it was a crapshoot as to what would and wouldn't work. They made it one of the biggest resource hogs I've ever seen, with the creation of a new instance of the Chrome process for every tab you open. Sure, doing that prevents a single tab from crashing the whole browser, but how often did that actually happen? It puts the Google Updater into your startup without asking or giving you an easy way to turn it off. To me, that falls under the category of "evil" with a little bit of "sneaky bastard" thrown in. It collects more information and usage stats than anything MS has ever produced (granted, that can be turned off). Google already gets enough information on me with my daily uses of their site and every site with a "search powered by Google" or "ads provided by Google", they don't need any more from me.
Basically, I can appreciate that having choices is a good thing, I just don't think Chrome is a good choice or that it was really necessary.

I've actually been saved three times from the fact that tabs are kept separate, but there's no way I'm going to argue that it was important. Your arguments are very fair ones. Personally, I found Chrome a wonderful event; upon install it was exceptionally clean, and the interface is very simple and intuitive, and takes very little space. I don't doubt that you can customize FF to a similar view, but I'm constantly on new computers or reinstalled operating systems and I don't have to do anything to Chrome to have it the way I like it. That, and upon viewing the options they pretty much managed to have all of the options that I cared about and none of the extra stuff. And I love the application shortcut feature, which produces a streamlined window for web applications very easily.
I can appreciate that my experience may not be the majority by any means, but I do think that Chrome is a solid choice in the browser lineup.

An app which installs itself in a hidden folder, and which installs an always-running updater without asking me... sorry but I don't call that a "exceptionaly clean" install...

I don't see what the folder problem is if you can uninstall easily through both the Control Panel and the "All Programs" menu under the start menu, and the Google Updater does not run continuously. At least, it's definitely not running on my machine right now, and I have seen a couple of articles claiming that it doesn't.

Sorry. I obviously should have put a lot more thought into my offhand comments on a web forum about an unimportant issue, can't have it that a phrase i use is meaningless.
Frankly you seem to be taking the whole thing very seriously when it's totally not. But..
If you are building a web site that needs to be accessible to users on all browsers, you need to test it in every browser. Plus you need to test it in all the main versions of each browser. Plus you need to test it with no CSS, no javascript, no images, audio browsers, etc.. and every combination of those factors, in each browser. Plus different browsers on different systems can be different (eg: IE on mac vs IE on pc). Plus you need to test different resolutions.
Even if you just take the main browsers and versions (IE8, IE7, IE5, IEMac, Opera, Firefox, Konqueror), plus 6 variations of features, plus 2 resolutions - thats 72 variations to test. Lets chuck in Chrome with another 6 variations and 2 resolutions. Gee thanks...
Google is a major funder and contributor of code to firefox. Chrome is just their way to push FF in the way they want it to go (not that they are wrong about that). ANd it's worked, given that half the features of chrome have made it into FF3.5.
But whatever.... it really isn't that big a deal...