14 DAY TRIAL // Google is moving ahead with the integration of Now into Chrome. In a sense, it's been working on this for months, it's part of the effort to integrate the Google homepage deeply into Chrome, making it a part of the new tab page.
Those efforts now include Google Now. In the latest Chromium builds, you can enable the Google Now integration in the chrome://flags section, though the feature doesn't actually work since it relies on server-side support, which hasn't been enabled yet.
In the latest Chromium builds, though it will land in the next dev channel update to Chrome 27, there is a "Google Now" experiment listed in the flags page.
The feature only works on Windows and Chrome OS. Enabling it won't actually do anything unless you know the Google Now URL, which Google is keeping to itself for the moment, as François Beaufort noted.
When fully functioning, users will receive notifications via Google Now the same way they do on Android phones.
Presumably, calendar events, flights, weather, anything that would be useful in a certain context will show up in the notifications.
To prepare for Google Now, the Chrome notifications platform has been fully revamped, the new rich notifications API is available to all developers, but Google clearly had Now in mind when it designed it.
Google is also working on adding the Google homepage, technically the logo, doodles and the search box to the Chrome new tab page.
This deep integration will mean that the Google search box replaces the Omnibox, or the other way around, that the Omnibox becomes a part of Google Search.
In any case, it's clear that search, particularly this "next generation" search will become an integral part of Chrome and that the browser will become more of an extension of Google's online services that it already is.