What as a consumer of flash platform I need form Adobe is clarity and commitment. Today I see it has gone another step backward. Just reinforces the public opinion of wanting to move away from Flash even more.
The section on Flash player for desktop does say they are keen on making it better, especially with on the multimedia front (I have to admit there are some pain points they do solve for multimedia). Nevertheless, I am with you in predicting that this is a sure sign of their slow but sure move towards killing it. I just hope people read it faster than we can and not pour money on building flash based solutions. (A lot of enterprise still use flash).
Chrome currently ships with both an NPAPI version of Flash, and a PPAPI (Pepper - basically a replacement plugin API developed by Google, as an offshoot of NaCl) version. The PPAPI version will still be updated, so when the next version of Flash comes out, Chrome will just use the PPAPI version.
But the PPAPI version will only be shipped with Chrome, and only Chrome / Chromium support PPAPI plugins. Any Linux users using any browser other than Chrome will basically be out of luck.