I had a strong gut feeling Google has one or multiple ulterior motives for doing this - motives that aren't very user-friendly (as they claim) but more Google-friendly. I thought it may be so that it can track every link you type in Chrome without 99.9% of the users being aware of it. Right now Google does that only for "searches" in the omnibox.

I hadn't thought about the amp angle, but that could be another reason for pushing this, too. Perhaps there are more we won't know until it's too late to do anything about it (other than changing browsers, of course).