OK, good point. Exchange + Outlook is much better for calendar management even when you have few meetings.
Exchange + Outlook are good about combining the information about your schedule based on the meeting requests you've received and not just the items on you calendar. Further, Outlook allows most email operations from your calendar (Reply/Forward/etc), and converts the calendar item into an email when needed so the user experience is much more seamless than using Gmail + Google Calendar.
hey google apps does that, too! :) i can create a calendar event right in an email, or click "create an event" to take me to google calendar. google calendar then populates data from the email and tries to guess the date and time...it actually gets it right sometimes, too. conversely, you can email attendees to a calendar event right from google calendar. not only that, you can select groups of people to email based on their response status. the integration between gmail and google calendar is very tight.
Gears is supported for Chrome and also OS X Snow Leopard, but not for Chrome on Snow Leopard. I'm guessing this is for sensible reasons but it looks kind of stupid.