In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P
I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.
Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.
I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P