Yeah, I don't think that's very prudent of them. This happened seven years ago, and as they say, many of the involved people left. What if one of them did have a meeting with this guy?
That doesn't make sense.
I have my own recollections of when/how the ChromeOS project started (since they asked for legal and open source advice ), and it pretty much matches other folks in that thread. I never heard from this guy, and I had heard from now-executives (they were just regular folks back then :P) about the idea/plan.
So, while theoretically possible still, it's pretty unlikely. I expect this is simply a case where a guy thinks what he did got used elsewhere, and it wasn't.
There were a lot of independently developed projects that did kinda-the-same thing back in 2006-2007.