Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're logging on to a remote server to do development,you're not taking advantage of the dual core i5 or 4GB of RAM. You're logged into an image that's giving you maybe 1 GHz of CPU and 512MB of RAM. You're buying a $1,300 machine to do development on a $300 machine, over a shitty internet connection.
But if you also have ~20 tabs open in your browser, and are streaming music etc... I am doing a thin client setup of sorts, and by the end of the day things start slowing down quite a bit. I do agree that $1300 is too much, at that price range you might as well get a mac. If it was 600-800 i'd probably jump on it. However, I think the curve ball here is the touch screen. I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy f…
If that's the case, pull an Apple and ship great dev tools on the installation disk. As far as I can tell, there are no top-notch Chrome OS development tools, just various ways to remote into a real machine to do that work.