Of course, the tree of computing liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of old technology. Apple started the dance that led to the elimination of the floppy drive ten years ago when it introduced the iMac; since then, it's been a leader in advancing other technologies like USB and Wi-Fi and pruning those that have withered. Chrome OS is likewise hastening to off old technologies. Conventional hard drives are not supported, for example, just solid-state storage. That means faster performance, but it also means pricier components--for now. But the popularity of those components, if Chrome OS catches on, will help lower prices and availability.

And if Chrome OS catches on, Apple stands to reap benefits too. Chrome OS could be the tipping point in the long-gestating shift from a PC-centric computing experience to a Web-centric one, and the Web is the ultimate platform--for the most part, it works on any computer. The more resources that get shifted to platform-agnostic technologies, the bigger the win not just for the Mac but for other platforms: the iPhone, for example.

Of course, there's a chicken-and-egg problem there, too, since the accelerated adoption of those technologies will depend strongly on how quickly Chrome OS catches on. Google was loathe to release any details of hardware or price, other than to say that it's working with netbook makers and that the prices would be in the range that consumers had come to expect. That's pretty vague, though: it could easily mean anywhere between $400 and $700, and you're already pretty close to an intro-level MacBook at the high-end of that range.

That leads me to one thing that struck me during Google's presentation: how very much the company was starting to sound like Apple. Google executive Pichai spoke of the importance of the end-to-end user experience and said that the company was working with vendors to specify reference hardware on which Chrome OS would be guaranteed to run. That sort of control over hardware and software certainly sounds more like Apple than it does like Microsoft or Linux, which tout their compatibility with the full range of generic PC hardware. More to the point, the particular features mentioned were things like a full-size keyboard, a comfortable trackpad, and specific display resolutions--all factors that Apple has emphasized in the past as differentiating its laptops from netbooks.

Chrome OS actually reminds me a lot of another purported revolutionary technology to come out of Mountain View in recent months: Google Wave. Just as Wave was Google's vision of instead of thirty years ago, Chrome OS is the company's vision of a truly "modern" computer operating system.