The Chrome OS announcement caused speculation from many sides as to what effect the Google platform would have on other Linux distros. At least Canonical could benefit from it.
Chris Kenyon, who is responsible at Canonical for its OEM business, in a recent blog entry congratulated Google on its source code release and also answered a few questions about Ubuntu's relationship with Google. In it he announced, "Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract." That is, Canonical is helping finance certain work on Chrome OS and some other Google components.
Kenyon also makes clear in the blog that cooperation is at least as important as competition in the open source market. Also that Google's Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson repeatedly emphasized that Google as much as possible wants to "build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention." Canonical thus sees Chrome OS not so much as competition than as an enhanced Linux product.