Why should they have to give anything special out? A bit of swag, sure, but pricey items? By your measure, they should be costing themselves at least $549/attendee (the difference between the Chromebook price and Google I/O admission cost). That's not including all the other costs that the admissions likely doesn't cover completely. Even for a profitable company that can afford it, other than the continued effort to drive everything to zero value, what's the point?

You make a developer event essentially free, and actually a net positive in material value, you end up with no developers attending. It's Comic Con for tech nerds. For a developer conference to have more value for the developers than the non-developers or they'll get pushed out because they're in the minority of interested parties.

> So much for loyalty.

Loyalty? Is buying attendance by giving away free stuff a way to show loyalty? Is buying users of software and players of games by giving it a way showing loyalty? It's a fucking PR stunt.