I am in the Mac camp (as mentioned upthread), but I think there is a serious risk here for Apple. That $550 Acer has the same amount of memory and an as large SSD as my new 2016 MacBook Pro that is Euro 1699 new. Plus a dedicated graphics card. Of course, the MacBook will have a better quality, but the price gaps between MacBooks and similarly spec'ed laptops are getting quite large.

Currently, a Mac or not is not a question for me. I prefer macOS with such a wide margin over Windows and Linux (for the desktop) that I am willing to pay the premium. Moreover, macOS has many applications that I like and are not available on other platforms (OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, Alfred, Tweetbot, Pastebot, etc.). However, after trying WSL I for the first time had the feeling that Windows could become an alternative to consider.

It's a direct response to this incorrect claim: "There are Windows Laptops with good 10+ hour battery life (e.g. Thinkpads). But they aren't a "little more" they're $1K+"

They aren't $1k+. They're literally a little more than the $400 Chromebook.

You can buy a perfectly usable Chromebook for $170.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019G7VPTC/

With a low resolution 720p screen and only 2GB of RAM and less than 10 hours of battery life. You can buy a similarly equipped Windows laptop for $199 or less, or with a more usable 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage for 30 bucks more. Of course there are both lower end Chromebooks and Windows laptops, but they're really beside the point to what's being discussed.

Windows is much slower on such a low spec device than ChromeOS. And if you install anything on your Windows device, god help your loading times.

Even low end devices are shipping with SSDs now. The last time Windows 10 was slow for me it was either because it was still on a 5400RPM drive (brand new $900AUD PC from a retailer...) or because Intel had tricked a whole lot of ODMs into thinking the Z series Atoms were desktop processors rather than for mid-range smartphones.

In fairness, the low-end $200 laptops have emmc storage, which isn't what consumers think of as SSD. Yes it is solid state and faster than a hard drive. But it's not typical SSD performance like you get on the $400+ laptops.

True - and it's really hard to judge eMMC performance because of high variability between models/brands.

eMMC 5.1 (introduced in Jan 2015) has read speeds up to 250 MB/s and write speeds up to 125 MB/s. They're much faster than the earlier eMMC chips, as well as laptop hard drives. Sadly, the early slow chips kind of gave them a bad reputation. They're perfectly workable now for a low-end machine.

because he wants to be productive, not "work" on twitter and facebook all day.