Because of using the Samsung Chromebook for a while with ChromeOS, I started getting very used to that way of working. I write code 70% of the time, which is not very nice on a Chromebook indeed, but because Crouton is a chroot, I ended up with a rsync/git chroot which takes a few minutes to install and is almost always synced with my server both at home and at the colo. For most of the work that $249 thing is just definitely good enough. And if it breaks / gets totally destroyed / whatever, I have everything back in no time and ready to work.