Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management for Google, explained Google’s vision for Chrome OS Netbooks to a room full of journalists last week, revealing, perhaps unintentionally, that Google is focused on more than just the software.

Chrome OS is aimed at netbook users and is designed for fast, lightweight computing. Pichai’s presentation, and much of the resulting press coverage, focused on usability issues, drawing obvious comparisons to Microsoft.

Yet, as CNET’s Tom Krazit picked up, Pichai revealed with the single sentence “We really want software to understand the underlying hardware,” that for Google, reinventing the personal computing experience is about more than just the software.

I don’t know as yet, what the many developers who have started playing around with Chrome OS since the open-source code was released think, but I do know this: Chrome OS is designed to push applications up to the cloud.

When consumers come to choosing their devices to access this cloud, they will need to know that the cloud they are accessing resides in a part of the stratosphere that is always on.

We don’t just need High Availability. We need it available full stop. Guaranteed Ultra High Availability will make or break the user experience, and therefore the business model. Reinventing the personal computing experience is indeed, about more than just the software.