I still remember when the original iPhone came out without support for native 3rd party software development, and Steve Jobs said with a perfectly straight face that the web is our SDK. Faced with the capabilities offered by native first party software at the time, it didn't fly then, (and that was on a phone, not a laptop), and I just don't see things having progressed enough in the four years since then for it to fly now. Maybe if they try again in another four years, when the state-of-the-art of web software and service creation and usage will have advanced a bit more, they'd encounter more enthusiastic support for this product. Hopefully, they haven't nixed the whole project by that point.

Browser capabilities have come a long way since 2007, and the use cases are very different between mobile consumer apps and business apps. While ChromeBooks aren't able to fill every need, I bet they could still fit the needs of a lot of organizations. I've worked in at least a couple places where every single business app was web-based.

They wouldn't have had a pricing problem if they would've went with a powerful ARM chip from the beginning, like say Nvidia's quad core Tegra 3, which handles browsing quite well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yab7mv9yOm8

Given that it doesn't run any external binaries, they still could?

I know they could and they probably will, but what I'm saying is that it could be too late. They had to make a first impression with Chromebooks and they blew it, in big part because of the pricing. They did the very same mistake with the Google TV Revue that was also powered by Atom and cost $300, while the ARM-based Apple TV was $100. And it seems they still haven't learned their lesson, now making all future Android versions optimized for Atom.

all i have to say is I love my chromebook and the majority of people that diss it haven't used one for more than a few days.

Key problem with Chromebook = no client side caching... This coupled with the nature of internet connections in America today (unreliable enough to lead to a momentary lack of being able to type into a cloud doc once a day for a moment) makes these products untenable for most users....

$200 - with decentish netbooks that can do all that and more at ~$250-270, chromebooks will never fly until they can hit $200.

That's still too high. We can get bulk pricing cheaper on HP net books with 3G through Verizon cheaper.

The Chromebook is the modern day Net PC.