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The first response of every techie exposed to the two is "hey, why don't they just combine..."

This has been too long coming. The best explanation I've heard for the ongoing split is a very Microsoft-like siloed set of development teams for the two pseudo-OSes...

Chrome is fairly sucky though, really, both as a browser and as a pretend OS. Getting Android more functional with a desktop/keyboard multi window environment would be the way to go in my opinion.