This is a game changer. I plan to get one for my 6 year old daughter. I have started her on Khan academy for math (I have been watching the vids myself - they are fantastic)
Not intrinsically, no. EDIT: Just for the record, before the OP edited his entry, it simply said "This is a game changer" which I consider an exaggeration. Of course, I can see how it makes for a nice children-appropriate machine, but that's not something new and exclusive to Chrome OS.
Also - this announcement I think is great, see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2535230 which I made last night.
The thing is that we will see a fundamental shift in how people compute in the next 18 months.
The questions are going to be very interesting relating to data security and privacy, though.
We just saw that the NSA captures the equivalent of a Library of Congress in data every 6 hours.
The amount that google will potentially capture through the chromebook system will be amazing.
They are planning other services as well that will enable these books in the long term.
The question about who will be a more valuable / viable company between facebook and google are now clearly ridiculous. Facebook will have a tough time coming anywhere near as influential as google from an infrastructure perspective alone.
Facebook will be a valuable service portal for a long time - but it will have to fundamentally shift in a big way to become a global computing infrastructure provider -- and it simply is not in its DNA -- Zuck I think the next revolution for the chromebook will be the web-app market that will be put on top of it. It will be interesting to see (and participate) in the building of the various lenses that you can view the web through on these things:
Education Lens: Like Khan Academy on Steroids
Business Lens: Business Productivity Suite
Healthcare Lens: All the EHR/PHR point of care service apps
Good times ahead.