As GigaOm reports, Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that’s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google’s Mountain View campus today. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the “full functionality of desktop applications,” they added. It also features a lock-down security model, where it will download a new image of the operating system and install it if malware is detected. Cached data will subsequently be retrievable in the cloud. Source code for the OS is avaialable now. For more details, see the GigaOm story.