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To be honest, this isn't true.

Chrome Packaged Apps allow developers to build alternative browsers using Native Client.

Just no one has bothered to do so because it wouldn't make much of an impact, plus alternate browsers wouldn't be able to set themselves as the default browser.

Wha?? That's not the same thing at all. ChromeOS is basically a browser, and ChromeOS applications are basically webapps.

(Or are you suggesting that some competitor will write a browser in JavaScript, which be disallowed from the appstore.)

That's not really fair, in the case of ChromeOS, the browser is the OS.

And honestly, this is why people say Chrome is slow or Chrome is a memory hog. There's so much non-web-browser stuff in Chrome it's just become tremendously heavy. That doesn't make it bad, and Google has recently done things to lighten it (like removing the feature of mirroring Now cards in Chrome), but it's the truth.