Yeah, Raspbian (Debian that is optimized for the Raspberry Pi.) is the way to go, particularly starting out. You will find the most help and resources for it, save the challenge of a different, OS for later. Incidentally, since you mentioned Chrome, you may be interested to know that there actually is an active effort on porting Chromium OS to Pi, but at this point it is just to the stage of being able to boot.
There is an "official user guide" scheduled to be released in October. You might want to keep your eyes open for that - it could be useful.
Answer
Yeah, Raspbian (Debian that is optimized for the Raspberry Pi.) is the way to go, particularly starting out. You will find the most help and resources for it, save the challenge of a different, OS for later. Incidentally, since you mentioned Chrome, you may be interested to know that there actually is an active effort on porting Chromium OS to Pi, but at this point it is just to the stage of being able to boot.
There is an "official user guide" scheduled to be released in October. You might want to keep your eyes open for that - it could be useful.
It's pretty neat what people have done with a $35 piece of hardware. Check out this portable workstation someone assembled: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pi-turned-into-a-portable-w...