In
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/ (the point of reference for this discussion), "systems" is defined as "Operating systems, networking, languages; the things that connect programs together." Examples of what he's talking about from other parts of those slides include:
> By contrast, a new language or OS can make the machine feel different, give excitement, novelty. But today that's done by a cool Web site or a higher CPU clock rate or some cute little device that should be a computer but isn't.
> Work on how systems behave and work, not just how they compare. Concentrate on interfaces and architecture, not just engineering.
> Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. (In some ways, it's been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.) Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux's interface isn't even as good as Windows!)
> There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts.
Chrome is an environment for running AJAX web applications and enabling them to talk to each other; among other services, it provides a graphical user interface toolkit (DHTML), a SQL database (SQLite), security mechanism and policy (via tab-per-process, the same-origin policy, incognito mode, and restrictions in the JS engine), a JIT compiler for a language, and process management (both at the user level, with its process viewer, and at the language level with Web Workers). It has a component architecture built in; several of them, actually: iframes, plugins, JSONP. It is possible in Chrome to build an interactive application from "piece parts"; this is currently called a "mashup".
So Chrome is right in the center of the issues Pike's talk was talking about. Much of this, of course, is made of ideas that don't come originally from Chrome; but Chrome is on the cutting edge of making new stuff possible.