If you closely watch Google quarterly financial reports and their search/content ad asset placements, you'll see that they are under tremendous pressure to monetize the web to show the investors they do a fraction of what is possible. Chrome UI updates often have traces of this pressure where search is favored against any other behavior to find information such as bookmarks, history, address bar.

Removal of editable URLs will push a few percentage of address bar led traffic to to search.

This has to be one of the main motivating factors, to get more search traffic and thus ad clicks.

If there's no way to enter urls, then all that's left is to search google.

Undoubtedly Google has become this for most of the world, but still importance of URL can't be ignored, specially if you build your own apps :)

thats quite and insightful joke :)