Chrome? What's so good about it?

I've been using Chrome for a day or two (in VM XP under Ubuntu) and, while it's certainly an acceptable browser and one I could live with, I'm not as bowled over about it as a lot of reviewers (eg Lifehacker) seem to be.
Now I didn't test any fancy stuff, mainly because I just don't use fancy stuff on a day-to-day basis, if at all. And, I certainly don't miss the thousands of Firefox extensions that Lifehacker is always raving on about. I really don't need them.
OK, but here's two things I don't like about Chrome. First, although the Recently Visted newtab page is a reasonable idea, it's really not as good as operas speeddial. In speeddial, yuou know where you put stuff so you can click on the image you want very fast. In Chrome, they can move around depending on what you browsed to recently, so for me it's just not as convenient.
Also, it seems that you can only get 9 things into Chrome recently visited page whereas in Opera it can be any number.
Another thing is that when I Open in New Tab, I want that tab to be the one whose stuff is shown, not waiting for me to click the tab to get it to show what I've just open. Firefox does this too (although I'm sure they've got an extension to redress this).
Is Chrome any faster than Opera? I really do NOT think so. Indeed, there might even be a case for arguing that Opera is significantly faster (at least for the things I do, and on my computers).
Would I use it when a Mac or Linux version became available? Yes, I would for sure, but at this stage, I really don't see that I'll be abandoning Opera fgfor a while at least.