One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever.
It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.
Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into.
Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil.
As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.
Google paid vendors so that Chrome installed and made itself the default without users even knowing what had happened.
That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.