They may be using arm processors and tiny flash memory like a phone with a large display. Although there are higher end ones with specs similar to low/medium end windows notebooks.

I don't think they are exclusive to America, but hackernews isn't the target for low capability machines.

They are rather cheap, I bought my kid one for $180, like 7 years ago and it's still going. The intro instructions showed that if you poured a soda into the keyboard shake it out a few times and it should be fine. In highschool they handed my kid a laptop on the first day, quite a bit nicer than the 7 year old laptop, and of course quite familiar.

I've seen minimal market penetration outside of education. It is nice that they upstream patches for linux and to be called a chromebook they have to support a dev mode where you can install your own OS. So you can get a laptop, without paying the Microsoft tax.

Really? At least the Walmart here stopped selling PC laptops and only sells chromebooks now.