I don't buy this argument. Wanting to have a more complete rendering engine for their crawler might have been a factor in designing Chrome, but I can't imagine it was in any way the driving force. The costs of developing a browser that runs well on millions of different computers and configurations are far beyond what it would take to make a really great headless version of WebKit for your crawler.
Yeah, I took that part of the original article (the one this one is citing) to be a dumbed-down explanation of googlebot's new behaviors. That article's audience were SEO people, not "engineers". It's unfortunately misleading enough that we get articles like these once you try to extrapolate from that.
