It's a good point, Google is missing the boat in terms of how people use search engines, i.e. as navigational rather than question question answering. But also, calling SGE a chatbot is missing the point of what Google is trying to do.
I mean, you can see the "commonly searched" things to see that far more people ask it questions they expect an answer to rather than traditional keyword based queries, like someone familiar with tech might do in order to navigate a bunch of sites that may contain what you're looking for.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land reports that Google is going to start pushing SGE out to some users, even if they haven't opted in to the "Labs experiment."
A Google spokesperson told the site SGE will be turned on for a "subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the US."
Google will turn on the feature for "queries that are often more complex or involve questions where it may be helpful to get information from a range of web pages—like 'how do I get marks off painted walls.'"
I don't think anyone has spotted one of these non-opt-in SGE pages in the wild yet, so it's unclear what the presentation will be.
The chatbot is easily Google Search's biggest format change ever, and having that happen automatically would be awfully confusing!
Reid previously led—wait for it—the SGE team, so the prevailing theory is that we're going to get way more AI stuff in search going forward.
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