A $100 smartphone beats 400$ netbooks from 2008 in terms of hardware. 1920 x 1080p full HD display, an 8-core processor with 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage.
You've obviously never tried to use a 2008 netbook for anything productive...
I also used a chromebook for a few years... tbh, I only went back to a rmbp because I needed better VPN support where I was working... Of course, I generally avoid taking it with me anywhere, I use my work laptop at work (docked) and my desktop at home.. or my phone for the most part.
I've also done productive work on my OLPC XO-1s (and an external keyboard, usually my IBM Model M). For example: http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo
I started on windows, tried various Linux and ended up with Jolicloud on it, which was about the best I could hope for - but soon got a real laptop, and regretted wasting my cash on the netbook.
I was able to play old games, chat on IRC and read the occasional web page (though only one page at a time) and even watch videos. That latter part was a bit annoying though since i had to transcode most videos to a lower resolution and simpler codec, otherwise the CPU wouldn't be able to keep up (i do not think there was any video decoding acceleration). This usually meant that if i wanted to watch a 30m video i'd had to wait around 2 hours :-P. But i allocated time for that, doing transcoding while sleeping or going out.
Sadly one morning i destroyed the screen by stepping on it - i often used it at bed and left it at the side and one morning i stepped on it when i woke up. I later bought an Acer Aspire One as a replacement - that one was much faster (though some video still needed transcoding) and it had a much better keyboard. Sadly i lost it by forgetting it at a bus station.
Recently i bought a used EeePC 701 from eBay for a few dollars. It is in almost mint condition and instead of Linux it comes with Windows XP. I find it funny that at startup the OS always complains about the resolution (800x480) being too low despite being the native one :-P.
That's the nice thing about those netbooks still - they're available used for a few bucks (a lot less than $100!) often in very good condition, and a mainstream Linux distribution will run fine on them, even booting from SD card storage (which a lot of modern hardware will fail at)! Sure, you do need 1GB RAM and quite a few gigs of storage space, so the original eeePC 700 series is a no go, but everything else in that class works reasonably well.
We do see projects like pmOS that aim to do pretty much the same thing for modern mobile devices (tablets and smartphones), but the difficulties there are huge due to all the bespoke hardware - there's just no comparison.
Example: a 701 paired with an external good quality audio card plus Jaaa [1] might become a small useful standalone instrument for audio alignment (generator + spectrum analyzer).
[1] http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/
Jaaa is at about 75% of the page among lots of other interesting software.
It has a nasty hardware problem though, as it completely freezes down to requiring a cold reboot if I grab it with my left hand in the empty space left of the trackpad, but it appears other Thinkpads share the same problem as well. However after some years I had absolutely no problems in normal use.
...that's 5 inches. pixel count isn't everything. I'd rather take a 14" 1366 * 768 laptop than a than a 1920 * 1080 5" phone.
By comparison you get a 6” 1920 x 1080p screen on a 100$ ZTE ZMax PRO.