I think google still made the right decision. Users expect the address bar to behave like a tab specific widget. It has different contents on each tab. If the user starts editing the address and then switches to another tab, they expect their changes to be restored when they switch back. Putting the address bar under the tabs clearly shows the relationship between the tabs and the address bar. For users that haven't used tabbed browsing before, the layout in chrome is more intuitive.
Chrome could include an option to change the location just because 50 people complained about the default on a bug, but that approach to design often leads to a crowded preferences dialog that is difficult to find anything in. Chrome often provides better default behavior that can't be reproduced by any combination of firefox settings. For example, Firefox has several different preferences that control tab behavior, but no combination of the preferences can produce chrome's behavior.
Chrome opens new windows as tabs in the foreground, but tabs explicitly opened by the user load in the background. I believe that I can use 'open in a new tab' to open a new web page in the background even if the page author requested it to load in a new window. Last time I used Firefox, using 'open in a new tab' on a link that the page author wanted to open in a new window didn't do anything at all. The behavior in Firefox doesn't make any sense to people who don't know the difference between a regular link, a link with a target attribute, and a link that uses javascript to open a window. I believe that the Firefox developers closed the bug about fixing 'open in a new tab'.