It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for a web page to show a preview if the window size is small enough. You could do that with a media query. And then when it goes full-screen, it would already be loaded and that would just be a resize.
This would take cooperation from web sites.
Building richer cross-site interactions into web standards and browser interfaces is an intriguing idea. A more dynamic model of hypertext, where the browser intelligently displays linked-to content. Even though portals are a highly limited version of that idea, Google has a high chance of getting them standardized and implemented by competing engines, so hopefully more useful applications can be found.
Embedded youtube videos could support a navigation to the video page where the video just animated from the embed to its in-page position while continuing to play.
Embedded twitter posts could be clicked on to do the same sort of transition. Really this sort of thing applies to all kinds of media embeds.
Amazon ads could do the same sort of transition to the advertised item.
Basically, this could allow multiple different domains to coordinate to get some of the fluidity that you can build on a single page. Ex. you could develop a federated social network of many different providers (or video sharing or whatever) while retaining the UX of interacting with a single thing.