Comment by Wowfunhappy

It's absolutely not true on Lion or on Mavericks. You can just delete Chess. I know because I've done it. I've been using the system for five years.

On Lion—or, well, at least on Mavericks, but I'm assuming this is all Apple did starting in Lion—there is literally just a list of Appications in the Finder binary that, should you try to delete them, Finder will pop up a message stopping you. You can hex edit the Finder binary and the message will go away for the hex-edited app.

(Newer versions of macOS have signed system volume stuff, I'm not talking about that! This was introduced right around the time I nope'd out and built my current Mavericks computer.)