I'm not making any value judgements here - I am just wondering whether or not there will be any official way to download an ISO (in the manner of Ubuntu, for insance) of Chrome/Chromium OS and run it on arbitrary hardware.

I guess the question really comes down to whether or not Google is planning significant work on the hardware hooks into the OS - will it be possible for manufacturers to write ChromeOS drivers for their devices, or will Google develop that on their own?