It will run rings round IE and FireFox in terms of speed? Why? Well, computer software developers are well familiar with the 80/20 rule which says that around 80% of users use around 20% of the total functionality built into any piece of software. Lots of people use Microsoft Excel - very few of them plot Poisson distribution curves or connect to MySql databases with it. But they could...
What Google did was to make the 20% that most users need very fast indeed by removing the other 80% that relatively few people use.
So, if you need an incredibly sophisticated web browser which does all sorts of fancy things, then Google Chrome most definitely isn't for you.
If, on the other hand, all you really want from a web browser is to load websites really quickly, keep out viruses and do in-built spell-checking, you can't go wrong...