Well, you can do all that until you cannot anymore. The systems are designed in such a way that Google only has to flip a switch, and all Chromebook securely turn into bricks (presumably only the ones that haven't had developer mode enabled).

On top of that, Chromebooks are mostly used in an education environment where they are in fact locked down to Chrome OS for specific email address domains. Then the domain administrator can conveniently switch it into a brick.

Google for (oh the irony) "Widevine" and how it interacts with it. So it has the same sort of problems that Microsoft palladium had : things like Netflix and the like simply won't work as soon as you have the developer switch enabled.

General purpose computing is dependent on 2 things : ability to run your own programs AND the ability to lie about that fact to the network. Without the second the first is useless.

Google understands this subtle point, but it appears most people do not. So Google is exploiting our ignorance here.

I'm pretty sure Netflix works fine with developer mode switched on. I can confirm at the moment (away from Chrome OS devices right now) that Widevine works fine with Netflix on desktop Linux; I'm pretty sure I remember Widevine working on my Chromebook with developer mode enabled.

that mode still completely changes the universe. nobody can make a living selling chromebook software without consent of and payment to google.

The point is that with this configuration you can use or buy software that normally runs on Ubuntu.