As I understand it, the bulk of the work on Chromium is currently being done by google developers and not so strangely, Chromium has a bunch of google services hardwired in to it. Take a look at the list of services Microsoft says that they have replaced or turned of in the linked article.

Having developers that don't have share that google-centric world view working on chromium may give us a more neutral browser.

If we end up with a hard fork, having a major player like Microsoft in the mix may dilute google's total dominance of the browser by giving us a compatible browser that does not feed your data into google.

Either way, time to bring out the pop corn.