Unfortunately, because of Chrome/Windows' rendering, I can't really recommend any web font (@font-face) at small font sizes (16pt or less) yet. At larger sizes (say, 20pt or larger, though 150% of the browser's base size is better) there are enough pixels in the character grid that while the fonts in Chrome/Windows might not be "beautiful", they're not ragged either (unless the font is very poorly hinted, which is usually a problem with older free fonts from sites like dafont.com). So, realistically for the moment, if you can't do a server-side sniff for Chrome on Windows to serve a separate style sheet and your site needs smallish body copy, it's best to stick with that same stupidly small collection of "web safe" fonts we've had forever -- or specify a preferred "pro" font that's locally installed and fall back to a web-safe font before hitting the generic (eg. font-family: "myriad pro", helvetica, arial, sans-serif;).
You can't get a fall-back to a safe font when you use @font-face because you know the preferred font will be there. So that means that you either need to go "start-up big" or settle for the same body fonts you've been using since XP was the new kid on the block: Arial or Verdana for sans-serif, or Georgia or Times New Roman for serif, at least if you want the site to look more or less the same in every browser. If you can afford to rely on fall-backs, then you can use a more pleasing (and locally-installed) font at the front of the list.
It sucks that we have to do this, and that Google Chrome (of all things) is the "new IE" -- a browser that breaks nice things, but that has too big a chunk of the install base to ignore. And yes, Google's team knows about the problem (and Google is, oddly, one of the biggest font hosts on the entire interweb, so their left hand has an interest even if their right hand is apathetic) but there's still no fix in sight. But we live in hope.
