An experiment on working exclusively in the cloud
blog.controlgroup.com
blog.controlgroup.com
Having said that, for me personally I still prefer a very responsive UI, lots of keyboard shortcuts, and the kind of workspace / UI customization you can only get from desktops nowadays.
Besides, I'm too used to emacs. I SSH to an EC2 instance and run emacs when I need to write code on the Chromebook.
I would say yes, the Chromebook is great for non technical people. There's nothing to set up, nothing to back up, nothing to break.
The Chromebook is just Google Chrome. So if you think that a person can get by with just a browser, this is the way to go.