But if you also have ~20 tabs open in your browser, and are streaming music etc... I am doing a thin client setup of sorts, and by the end of the day things start slowing down quite a bit.

I do agree that $1300 is too much, at that price range you might as well get a mac. If it was 600-800 i'd probably jump on it. However, I think the curve ball here is the touch screen. I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy for this laptop is to do a smaller production run, and get these in the hands of tech/programmer types, and then use the lessons learned to develop a model targeted toward a wider audience.