I can get the same functionality in terms of hardware at the more or less same cost, certainly not $1000 more as you claim. A 1.7gighz ARM or the other versions aren't more powerful than a 1.6gighz or higher Atom processor at the same price point.

And I can run a real operating system on that hardware with no problems. My laptop boots in less than 10 seconds and I trust Ubuntu just as much as a Chromebook for security. If you are worried about the security of local files you can encrypt your drive, very simply in the last few versions of Ubuntu but I don't bother, if needs be.

None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX.

That's all fine for people who only do back-end stuff, or Google if they want their employees to "dog food" living in the cloud, but for someone who wants to be able to do normal everyday things like edit images, test locally or any of the many other advantages of a flexible system it doesn't really cut it. If there were locally running JavaScript equivalents for image editing and everything else we'd be a bit closer to feature parity but I still wouldn't see the major attraction.