Or just taken out of context. Since both Android and Chrome OS run on Linux, a small userland, and a display server, maybe there is some effort within Google to bring these two more together to reduce maintenance cost.

Disclaimer: I don't know how much the code bases differ now.

Fairly substantially. ChromeOS is a fairly standard Linux distro under the hood, albeit with not using X11 or directfb for their rendering layer, while Android uses a different libc, rendering layer, etc.