Like I said, my main use case is mine. I want to develop on my new ChromeBook Pixel (if it ever gets here) without being forced to use an Ubuntu chroot. Packaged apps have much larger size quotas and most my code repos are small anyway.
As far as the education aspect, I have future plans to create a new programming language aimed at learning to program that compiles to javascript. Combined with a proper in-browser IDE, this would allow any kid to learn to program on any machine that has a browser.
It obviously won't replace native dev tools, but it will make web-based stuff a whole lot more powerful and that's something I and many others feel is worth paying for.