Because this preference developed slowly, I found myself reinstalling Chrome for each new user, which is dumb. In theory, Chrome offers an administrative "install for all users", but contrary to PC admin intuition (because the Chrome distro model is oriented toward the smartphone and tablet app paradigm), you have to navigate through the "offline installer" distro channel.
In practice, the current offline installers (enterprise and otherwise) die with a message like "Google Update installation failed with error 0x80070057" on XP Home, which doesn't help me at all. For a company that offers so much to webmasters for marketing and dev, I'm surprised they haven't invested more in making their browser IT-friendly.