It's not the beginning of the end for any other browser(s). Chrome is completely open source and they have introduced new concepts that will improve the web for everyone. They are encouraging others to embrace their approaches (not all of them), but there are a couple that I'd expect to find in future releases of many if not all browsers.
More specifically chrome has contributed greatly with their V8 JavaScript engine that runs JavaScript locally on the end users computer. This makes "web 2.0" style websites function much faster than the traditional method of relying on the browser to handle all the JavaScript. The speed increase is easily noticed when working with content management systems, social networking websites, and other application which use lots of AJAX and JavaScript.
V8 compiles JavaScript source code directly into machine code when it is first executed. There are no intermediate byte codes, no interpreter such as you'd find with JScript (in Internet Explorer), SpiderMonkey (in Firefox), and JavaScriptCore (in Safari).
V8 also, reclaims memory used by objects that are no longer required in a process known as garbage collection. On a daily basis at work (I'm a web developer for a private college) FireFox will easily approach well over 300mb of memory usage by the days end. We use a great deal of JavaScript within the applications that we develop. I've yet to see Chrome use up this kind of memory.
I also expect to see many other browsers introduce the single process for each tab.
This just scratches the surface of what Chrome is really bringing to the table and as a web developer these are the two things that impress me the most with Chrome. Also, don't forget that Chrome is still only in BETA.
Try comparing chrome with other browser on the JavaScript intensive pages such as the JQuery demos:
http://ui.jquery.com/repository/late...os/functional/