I agree with your thoughts on the 2 bars being wasteful, but we shouldn't abandon the url bar entirely. Sure give it double function (search and direct url), but eliminating it entirely seems like jumping the gun.
this seems like a conniving way to drive more traffic to google.com so people like my parents will then type in the urls they already know into google's search box
If you type a couple words into the Safari URL bar, you are likely to get an error page. Type those into the Chrome bar, you get a search for the terms. Type a real URL into either one, and you go there. Which is preferable, a search or an error page? It's not conniving, it's convenient.
this seems like a conniving way to drive more traffic to google.com so people like my parents will then type in the urls they already know into google's search box