I actually view Chrome's PDF plugin as a complete abomination (at least on the Mac), and go out of my way to nuke it. It's slow, and there is _no_ easy way to open the PDF displayed in a PDF handling app (i.e. Preview) without resorting to copy and pasting the URL into wget.
You can open PDFs displayed in Safari in Preview without saving them to the disk. (There is also a button that puts the document in the Downloads folder.) Chrome’s PDF viewer is better than Adobe’s plugin but worse than Safari’s PDF viewer.