I am writing this on a Chromebook Pixel 2013 variant, the wifi on this machine and every other Chromebook I have used is rock solid. I like the 'design classic' aspect of the Pixel (original flavour) and I didn't want to take it to pieces or leave it broken. Therefore, new Chromebook. My new cheap (£250) Chromebook is the Asus one with the HD screen, zero moving parts and a tough aluminium case. Everything on it works except for the internal speakers (sound is on HDMI) but I don't need sound to read my emails and write stuff in 'vi'.
Rather than go for an esoteric linux I went for the ease of Gallium OS. This is an XFCE Ubuntu with all the hardware sorted except that HDMI sound problem...
Now for ports... I presume next-gen Chromebooks will be USB-C, I just wanted a glorified keyboard/screen with wifi that worked, however, the ports are proper ones on the Chromebook, no fiddly mini HDMI or other leads that restrict the movement of the laptop. Battery life - realistically I can go all day but I get range anxiety if I do that so I carry the brick.
I run DHCP on the cheap Chromebook complete with a reverse proxy so that my dev environment (still on the old laptop) can be worked on via the Chromebook (which runs keyboard/mouse sharing via Synergy) and via the phone/tablet for testing.
I believe that the next generation Chromebooks are going to solve a lot of problems for me, my cheap chromebook doesn't do sound, the screen is non-touch but HD, the keyboard is not backlit (I use an external keyboard now) and I am not sure it has a CPU... I wonder if the android running next-gen Chromebooks will eat into the non-pro, non-developer market that Apple are trying to make their own, if this does happen then the Apple market share will start to diminish.
The new $500 Samsung with HiDPI screen? I do all of my development remotely like you, but on an Azure VM. I just want a nice screen to look at when I typing into vim via mosh. At $500, I'm really hopeful that there will be a steady stream of Linux-capable, HiDPI, USB-C enabled hardware for the forseeable future. I already own three chargers that will charge it.
Yes, I love Chromebooks and I'm not that into Chrome OS. Thank you Google!
Meanwhile, I've installed Arch and NixOS on a Chromebook Pixel 2013, Chromebook Pixel 2015, Lenovo X1 Carbon and a 2015 Macbook Pro in the last 18 months. Never had a significant issue, other than sound not working on the Pixels until I ran `yaourt -S linux4-samus`.
When these threads pop up, I often get the impression that people are relaying experiences from 5+ years ago and assuming nothing's changed since then.
Meanwhile, I don't have to deal with OS X's obnoxious behavior: the fact that I can't have a touchpad be natural scroll with an external mouse that is normal scroll. The fact that PageUp/Down/Home/End act completely inconsistently when using a "Windows" external keyboard with OS X. The feature-less window manager. Finder. Etc. If I have to spend 20 minutes tweaking Linux on my laptop, it's a small price compared to bending to OS X's quirks. In my opinion, of course.