Unfortunately for Chrome, Safari 5.1 has set a new standard for gesture support that will be hard to replicate (if they even care to, I'm not convinced Google actually cares about feeling 100% "native" on any OS).
Interestingly enough, I’ve heard the same thing as you just pointed out, out of a lot of people since Lion. A lot of people who had previously laughed at me for remaining with Safari (as if it’s somehow inherently inferior to Chrome? I’ve never quite understood it.) are now, themselves, switching back … just for gestures, as far as I can tell.
I have to ask: Is it really that much of a life-changing feature for you, in a browser?
For regular browsing, I can't stand not having:
* Favicons on the tabs. It's impossible to glance at 5+ tabs in Safari without getting completely lost.
* Favicons on the bookmarks bar. My bookmarks bar doesn't have a single character on it, it's all just favicons with blank names that makes it into a horizontal list of frequently used sites.
* Any sort of Synching. Right now my Chromes at Work, Home Desktop, Laptop, and Tablet are completely in-tune with each other.
* A real omnibar/awesomebar. There are some extensions that make this more bearable, but the default address and search bars are pretty worthless.
About your other points.
>A real omnibar/awesomebar
I've found Chrome's Omnibar to be very annoying, to be honest. The last version I tried (probably Chrome 14) still couldn't do substring searching for titles or maybe even URLs. Pressing control for navigation (standard Emacs C-n, C-p stuff) change the ordering of navigation items. I've found it to be very much unpredictable and is one of my main reason of not using Chrome as a primary browser.
Firefox's AwesomeBar is awesome, though, only if I could navigate using C-n C-p.
>Syncing
Xmarks[1] works beautifully across browsers and platforms. I've used it to sync between Safari, Firefox and Chrome without any problems.
>Favicons
Have you tried out Glims[2]?
[1]: http://www.xmarks.com/ [2]: http://wiki.machangout.com/howdoi/glims-development-build
Xmarks is ok, but it only covers a fraction of Chrome's synching, which includes Bookmarks, Passwords, Form Input, Extensions, and Preferences. And it's being completely integrated with their forthcoming Profiles feature, which means that I can finally easily switch between dev extensions enabled (which otherwise use a LOT of resources if left on for regular browsing) and normal profiles, and the bookmarks/passwords of a significant other don't interfere with my own.
I haven't checked out Glims, so thanks for the link.
Your assertion that safari gets webkit changes later is correct if you restrict yourself to official releases. But if you include the nightlies, I'd say the gui application we call safari wins out over chrome. The changes to webcore, note i'm omitting javascript interpreter changes since google plugs v8 into webcore/kit, tend to show up in the webkit project and thus webkit nightlies well before google merges them into chrome/chromium.
I use lastpass/xmarks for syncing though. Just because I like the option of ditching chrome if I ever need to. And I pay the $20/yr so I can get the desktop/mobile versions in sync too. i* devices included.
I totally agree on the favicons part, wonder if there would be a way to make an extension bookmark bar or modify the tabs. Haven't looked at what the allowed extensions can do.
On that note, extension syncing, chrome is about the only browser that gets this part right. I wish all would allow pref synchronization, half the reason I despise firefox is getting all my extensions in sync on each computer.
I'd love to see Google vs. Apple's research for one vs. the other. It seems to be one of the polarizing issues.
Safari 5.1 on Lion isn't a life changer, but the gestures just feel right. Going back to Chrome feels like taking a step backwards, especially on a Magic Mouse where the double-finger-sideways swipe is still somewhat awkward.
An underhyped but incredibly well implemented feature: in an article webpage, Option + Escape launches reader mode and immediately reads the complete article text using OSX's Text-To-Speech.
1) only 1 URL/search box (replaced by SafariOmnibar on Safari, doesn't work perfectly with Resume)
2) the search engine capabilities from the omnibar ("st mac" would search "mac" on StackOverflow) which I replaced with Alfred.
Don't miss Chrome at all anymore (still use it for its embedded Flash capabilities).