A note: disabling the 'Instant extended API' in chrome://flags gives you the old new tab page back.

(I can see the reasoning, but personally think it's ugly and a waste of space. Then again, I never liked having Google as my homepage to begin with)

Google spent this much time on trying to get dumb users to learn to search from the omnibox? I think there is a solid opportunity to target highly skilled users with high performance machines. You can use more shortcut keys for things, and you don't have slow down from casual/confused users

I don't understand the purpose of this change. If Chrome was a new product, I'd understand it as it'd probably mean that Google was trying to get people to use Omnibox, but don't people already know that the address bar is also the search bar? This is just a waste of space.