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Having played a lot of IG through the last few editions, I must agree with what many have already said:

I'm in agreement with a lot of what's been said above. The two distinct advantages (with sub-points, too!) I can see are:
1) Survivability
1a) Can no longer be killed by small arms fire. Sure, you can flank and bolter it but mathhammer averages you just over 2 glances from a 10 bolters if you're in rapid fire range. Get lucky and you kill it, yes, but why are you letting those marines in to rapid fire range? The same number of marines can wipe or panic the squad fairly reliably (average just over 8 kills).
1b) Can no longer see the whole squad wiped out by one or two good large blast or template hits. Templates will rarely do anything, and blast may glance or pen, as somebody mathed out earlier.
2) Greater mobility
2a) Which means you can relocate if a position is going to be overwhelmed
2b) You can grab points in the last couple of turns or actually reach the point buried deep in your opponent's deployment area
2c) They take up less space when in a chimera, making it easier to put 80 of them on the board.

Now, the question of durability.
1) Armor 12 on the front; side shots are painful, but you should give your opponent other things to fire his anti-armor weapons at, like Leman Russ. Other than their transport capability and a little bit of extra firepower, Chimera aren't a high priority compared to battle tanks, Hellhounds, and Hydras.
2) Maneuver them correctly (by keeping them near your lines, keeping them in their own line, or making sure to skirt cover and board edges) and side shots are less of a problem. I did say less of one; I'd much rather have armor 11 on the sides, but I'll live with 10.

Ideal? No. More survivable than sending them on foot? Yes. But you could get a whole new squad of IG for that! You're getting more heavy weapons if you get the Chimera, for a cheaper cost, and the darn thing is mobile. You lose out on a scoring unit, but you've probably got quite enough of those already.

Now what would be cooler is if we could get Chimera as dedicated transports for heavy and special weapon teams (as opposed to having to play musical chairs on the first turn to accomplish the same thing).