For comparison, if I push Firefox with tabs for the sake of it, it will also nom 1-1.5GB of RAM quite happily(10 youtube tabs and 20 non-youtube). Depending on how many video's are loaded in RAM/buffering adobe flash will nom a further ~500mb. Chrome appears to execute flash inside of its own processes, rather than separately, so in total I would say that Firefox, for me, is using 2GB of RAM.

The only reason chrome/FF using 2GB of RAM would be an issue is if a system runs, lets say some slightly outdated 4GB of RAM. Windows uses 1GB and chrome uses 2. This leaves an extra 1GB for ALL other processes/activities the user requires to run simultaneously. When 4GB of data is reached (think chrome + 1 game) the RAM becomes full, and the processor must now decide what pieces of data are stored in RAM, but are not being accessed frequently and move them to hard disk. This puts extra processing load on the machine as well as drastically increases seek times to those pieces of data stored on hard disk, as well as write operations too memory. When you hit 4GB of RAM usage, the system will appear to hang/freeze up/be extremely slow and unresponsive while it waits on hard disk reads/writes.

There was a time when Chrome was noticeably faster than Firefox, due to being lightweight, minimalistic, and a relatively small quantity of available plug-ins, but this time has long passed and Firefox has become more optimised while still maintaining functionality, as well as processors/RAM continuing to apply Moore's law(and in some cases achieve better than), as well as consumers upgrading their tech has lead to the browsers impact on an "average" 8GB system with dual/quad core being essentially unnoticed. 2GB of RAM on a browser with such a machine, is not a concern at all. Similarly, more RAM usage is not a bad thing in all cases. There are many algorithms that decide to take advantage of trade off’s between memory and processing; sometimes it is possible to store data in an ordered fashion(and possibly including data redundancy) such that performance for desirable/frequent operations is greatly increased. The usage of more memory can indeed be a good thing, the only real limitation is having the available overhead to not have the system freeze when it starts actively using a page-file.

P.S. Chrome is still running in RAM when you are tabbed into a game. Loading anything into the page-file that does not need to be there is an extremely undesirable operation. If chrome was page-file'd while playing a game and listening to youtube/music, there would be noticeable distortion/lag within the music.