Yep, this still appears to be the case. It establishes a long-lived SSL connection to one Google's servers few seconds after the start. If the connection is forcefully killed (e.g. with SysInternal's TcpView), it won't be re-established, but needing to kill it every time I need to use Chrome is really annoying.
It is also the reason why I have Chrome updates permanently disabled - I don't trust Chrome enough to let it run anything in a background.