I like the view idea better than explicitly referencing objects in other DBs. 

But to me the idea of having to grant my users rights to the underlying tables in the other DBs is significantly worse/more painful than simply enabling cross-database ownership chaining. 

On my production servers the only db-owner we allow is sa, and cross-db ownership chaining is enabled.  We use similar approach for cross-db views, and users have no rights to underlying tables.  Is there some security downside to this approach that I'm missing?