My grandmother just played a Wii for the first time. Now my Grandmother has NEVER seen the thrill of video games since she first saw them 16 years ago. I mean she had no desire to play any whatsoever. When she saw me with the Wii she actually said "looks like fun, can I try?" and we played a game of bowling on the Wii. She didn't quite get the buttons but the motions she did and she had an absolute blast.
Its all about interaction with the computer, and letting people interact with it in a natural way. Geeks care about "multitasking" on a computer, non-geeks care about their computers always running at top speed for any application they use. They don't care that you can have 100 windows open at a given time, just the fact that 1 is open and works well and they'll close it an open another. How many people here enjoy the fact that the blackberry allows multi-tasking and you have to spend time worrying about background processes sucking up your cpu?
I think this is the reason why the chrome os has tons of potential.