OTOH, when you make a break-the-world release every six weeks, you can expect lots of breakage when dealing with the rest of the world. From what I can tell, Google pushed a feature they wanted into Linux, then didn't bother to think about backward compatibility. This would be fine if Chrome weren't force-updating software -- people on older kernels could just wait and update when they updated their kernels -- but alas that is not the case.
Yes, it is a good thing for the people who 1) use desktop linux and 2) use a rolling distribution or a distribution that was released within the last year. I suspect that might be a rather small percentage of the Desktop users in the world.
It simply means that people who 1) use a desktop Linux and 2) use a stable distribution can't run Chrome (which I imagine solves the security problem in another way). This fraction of a fraction may be larger (corporate desktops, e.g. RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS &c)
If that's not enough to "generate a ton of good will" then doing one more minor thing won't change anything.
If they start giving out hundred dollar bills, you'll be complaining that it's not two hundred dollar bills.
This is not so minor.
If they start handing out hundred dollar bills I would think they'd gone nuts.
Google's being aggressive about taking advantage of a kernel-level security feature that they developed to solve a real problem. This seems like a good thing overall.