Sort-of, but you still have netbooks; I have an old netbook as my developer computer ! it has an Atom, which is slow, 2GB RAM, and an SSD; I dual-boot windows and Linux; can run Visual Studio Express, and of course, all Linux stuff (I even run Unity on Ubuntu). You can get an Acer netbook for about the same price of an Acer chromebook.

Also, we've just bought an Acer V5, 12.1" with touch screen, 4GB Ram, and an A6 processor; really nice, for $429 ; it's a sub $500 laptop that doesn't suck; basically, a slightly nicer netbook :)

Chromebooks are nice, especially for simple stuff, but there are nice cheap laptops too :)