Found an interesting article titled “Google Is Serious: You Can Kill Chrome’s URL Bar” which gives a glimpse of what may be around the corner; The ability to hide the URL bar by default.
What is the purpose? Smaller desktops, such as those found on netbooks could benefit from gaining a few pixels of real estate on the screen. However, as we browse more visually these days, it is not difficult to imagine that different ways to navigate the web may also be coming. I still enter a large percentage of all sites that I visit in manually, but I can foresee the day when that may not be the case.
Those who use tablets to browse find every way they can to avoid manually putting in the URL already.