I suppose it is "nifty" for folks that actually like the instant search feature, but I've been happily avoiding it by doing my searches through the URL bar in Chrome. Guess they'll take that option away, too? Oh well, I'm not going to nerd-rage about it like some of the posts I've seen on Slashdot. It's just a minor annoyance to me but I'll likely still use Chrome to browse and Google to search. I really like Chrome, mainly because it's one of the few browsers that's lightning fast when I have lots of tabs with Flash heavy content open. That's probably only because of my aging hardware, and it's not like Firefox is really sluggish on my system, just noticeably slower.
Plus Chrome has other neat features, like when I type the URL of a site I have searched before, you can search that site again by pressing tab, so I don't need to have a bunch of different search boxes for different sites like I do in Firefox. Anyway, I guess I'll reserve my judgement until it's actually implemented, maybe they'll do it in a way that isn't too irksome or distracting.