I'm not really sold - one of the strengths of the iPad is that it has a UI that's specifically geared towards finger interaction - a lot of this concept seems like it's just doing "desktop UI with touch enhancements". IMHO that's not enough.
The point of the Chromium site is not to sell, but to be pretty open about what we're doing and what we're thinking early in the process so that our external contributors, who we value highly, can get access to the same information that our internal teams can and so that they don't get surprised by sudden public changes in direction.
It's a tough balance - not over-specifying yet being open, especially when people are used to everything a company puts out being a high-definition advertisement. This open development style is still new to me, and hope we'll get better at it with practice.
(FWIW, this is all personal opinion, not Google's).
Also, as a general suggestion, one of the -worst- things about the current desktop is manual window management - please, please come up with an automatic system that works! The iPhone sidesteps this by only allowing one app at a time, but with several apps it'll be one of the make-or-break aspects of these devices...
I particularly like how you can switch from one application to another by scrolling horizontally and then resizing the window's width as you need. Furthermore, the additional gestures with 3 and 4 fingers provide additional information bandwidth.
These ideas might solve some of the problems others in this thread have been pointing out.