> I don't see a point in plugging my entire keychain (the physical keychain, with my car keys) into my laptop every time I want to log in
> I'm not sure about having to plug it in every time
I'll share my experience. I use two of these on a laptop and desktop and I have never unplugged them; there's no reason to. They sit very flush in the USB slot. I suppose if I ever needed the extra USB slot for something else I might unplug it.
I use a Yubikey for ${WORK} and we are required to remove such tokens as soon as they have fulfilled their purpose. On pain of disciplinary action, as it is considered on par with leaving a password on a Post-it.
Otherwise there's no point in them as an additional security step in the event that the laptop is lost or stolen.
Behind the scenes, the auth layer in Chrome is handled by a sneaky extension. There's a huge listing of product IDs in the manifest, all likely to launch very soon: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/...
(And some explicit Play Store references: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/c6b104c... )