You could just use F11? Is it possible to have F11 without the autohiding? Also on KDE, say, you could easily hide the title bar and borders too (which would approach the Chrome look).

My layout is like his before shot. I use the menubar entries often enough that I want them to be easily accessible - a single "Menu" entry that popped up the other menu items as an overlay menu would be great for me and would allow me to ditch the menubar. As for the status bar - I do like to be able to see the target for links by mousing over them, again this could be an overlay (I think Chrome does that too? perhaps Opera, can't recall).