It's already mirrored through their CDN, but wouldn't shipping a cached copy of the Google.com page into Chrome still save huge amounts of bandwidth and resources?
How so? If google wanted to save bandwidth, they would simply up the cache time of their page(s), baking some version into the browser only saves the very first load. Doesn't seem like a decent strategy to face potential backlash for baking in their search page when the same thing, sans the initial load, can be accomplished with other techniques