Chrome for Android is expected to start aligning with desktop releases of the browser by "early next year," according to a post by the Chrome team on Google+.

Q. Chrome for Android is still at v18, while regular Chrome is at v23. When will Chrome for Android catch up?

A. Soon! We expect an update to Chrome for Android starting with a developer update to happen before the end of the year, and we’re actively working towards aligning releases across all platforms, including Android, starting early next year. 

(emphasis ours)

So, what does this mean? At some point next year, Google is going to begin the process of aligning Chrome releases across all platforms, meaning the guts in each platform's respective release will be more similar, and features across platforms will vary less. Note that I didn't say "won't vary at all" - don't expect Flash support to spontaneously return to Android any time soon just because Flash is built into the desktop version of Chrome. But plugins for the Android version would be nice, Google. Work on that.

As you may have also noticed, Google is promising a new developer build of Chrome for Android by the end of the year, though it isn't clear how far that will go in "catching up" to the desktop version.

Google+