I've always thought it was a clever move by Google.
1. You can't accuse Chrome of being a trojan horse for their search engine.
2. It makes Microsoft look bad when they default to Bing.
3. When asked, people almost always pick Google anyway.
4. Google now have (another) way of quantifying #3.
Re: #4, I would imagine the percentage of Google Chrome users who would pick Google over an alternative would be a bit higher than the percentage for internet users overall.
Agreed, but I'm sure the trend data would be useful for quantifying how their brand is tracking (not to mention how their competitors are tracking).
Plus I'm sure they can separate statistics based on whether they installed it directly, or whether it was installed as part of Skype, or whatever. The skype-installed user base would be somewhat closer to typical users.
1. You can't accuse Chrome of being a trojan horse for their search engine. 2. It makes Microsoft look bad when they default to Bing. 3. When asked, people almost always pick Google anyway. 4. Google now have (another) way of quantifying #3.