Bought Chromebooks (and Chromecasts) for all my tech-illiterate family members in order to cut down on having to provide tech support, and it's been amazing. No issues so far, and everything just works.
For all my tech-illiterate family I bought an Ipad which pretty much worked in the same way (Not need to do tech support and satisfied their needs).
* All of the actionable UI items are too small
- Simple things like giving focus to the App store "search bar" are difficult for me, very difficult for her
- Clearing App store search bar by clicking the X is very difficult for me, impossible for her
- Install button takes 1-3 attempts for me, maybe 10 for her
* Use of icons instead of simple text
- I purchased the new iPad Air for her, hoping the larger size would make it easier to use. Embarrassingly, I could not even figure out how to install an app. I was searching for the "Install" button for ~30 seconds and even clicked the wrong icon once.
* E-Mail application randomly closes emails
- Once again I thought this was user error. She attempted to open several emails, and each time they would close immediately and return to the inbox. It turned out to be some bug in the mail application. Restarting the device didn't fix it.
On the other hand, she also has a Samsung Chromebook and has had absolutely zero issues with it. To be fair, it's a bit slow playing some facebook games and occasionally I wish I got her a normal windows laptop (for instance, the Optimum app is not supported, nor is the slingbox player).
Interestingly, I just gifted an iPad mini retina to my girlfriend earlier today and just went through the setup a few minutes ago. She attempted to install her first app which is marked "Free" and "iPhone only" (there is no iPad version). Upon clicking it, she had to log into her Apple ID (even though she just entered this information in the setup process). Next it said her ID was never used in the iTunes store (what's that?!?) and she had to register with her credit card (free app!?). After that dialog submit failed with two error messages (because I saw her click the Submit button twice), it returned back to the install screen. She clicked the Install button a second time, it forced her to enter her Apple ID and password AGAIN and then it started downloading. I thought iOS was supposed to be easy to use!? Even she kept commenting how difficult it is to use. She also has a Kindle Fire and never had any issues with it.
Long story short, I can alt+ctrl+shift+f2 and get to an Ubuntu install where I have XFCE installed and access to a real xterm + tmux + Skype. It has all of my dev tools (c compiler, python, jvm) and can even do Android development. I can alt+ctrl+shift+f2 and go back to normal Chromebook stuff. I use Chrome plus a special plugin in ChromeOS that lets ChromeOS and my Crouton/Ubuntu install share a clipboard. Combined with Chrome's normal syncing, I sometimes forget which environment I'm in when browsing the web.
If you can follow some instructions and want a cheap dev laptop that is no fuss for the basics, I'd recommend a similar setup. These days, I'd probably go for the 14" HP, although I haven't checked to make sure I could upgrade the HDD and RAM to acceptable specs.
(Note, I'm not the GP.)
Word: Google Docs is more than enough for the type of documents they work on.
Photos: Photos are taken on the iPhone and shared directly via FB/etc. No need to touch a computer.
Some users don't need Office-type documents on the laptop -- they have a work-issued computer or it's not a requirement of their day-to-day needs. Similarly with photo management -- maybe they don't have a camera, or they just leave photos on their phone without a copy on the computer.
Other users believe in the Google vision, which is Google Docs and Google+ Photos. (Picasa's web interface is basically dead now.)