I’m all for the innovation Google churns out, and I’m a big fan of a lot of their services.  Their Chrome browser is the latest thing, and it’s obviously built for speed.  Their main goal seems to be to optimize the users experiencewith these online services.  I applaud and welcome that initiative.

There has been speculation that this is part of Google’s effort to obsolete the operating system as we know it.  I doubt that would happen.  I don’t know many people who would trust their entire lives on someone else’s servers.

I think the future is sync services.  Gmail has IMAP and Address Book Sync, Google Calendar has CalDAV, iPhoto has PicasaWeb Uploader, etc.  All that’s missing IMO is a main file store like iDisk, that works like Dropbox that plugs directly into Google Docs with the help of Google Gears.  So the documents themselves show up as a folder in Finder or Windows Explorer or Nautilus or (Enter your OS here), but this folder actually exists online.  You could then point Google Gears to watch this folder.  The possibilities are pretty much endless.