The hardware of the pixel looks great. If Windows had a proper touchscreen driver, I'd probably buy one and load it up with Windows (or, if I could get OSX running on it...)
I guess if you really have a thing for aluminium then the case is nice enough, but I find it extremely uncomfortable to use at times (the sharp edges have a tendency to bite into my wrists if I am not careful to keep my wrists elevated.)
I think for many users the Chromebook does fine, and I think for many others the Chromebook is too limiting. I would personally be very happy if, say, Chrome OS was built as a dual-boot solution for Microsoft Surface. Chrome for general case, and an escape hatch to Windows for games or whatever. A VM solution hosted in Windows would also work here.
However, my last attempt at running Chrome OS in a VM indicated that the open-source version of Chrome OS (at least as downloaded by VMWare) was running at a significant lag behind what's being pushed to Chromebooks right now, so I stopped investigating it any further.
I agree with you on the state thing. The problems we have (hopefully temporary) are the number of choices of where to store our state are inadequate (i.e. too many hosted in the US) and we're living with the layers of crap that is the modern web. The idealist in me would prefer a clean slate completely, but the pragmatist knows they're approaching this in the only way the idea will get traction.
That and if touch is enabled things like Gmail like to add lots of padding around stuff regardless of if you're going to use the touch at all.
Frankly, I found the touch utterly useless, especially since the touchpad is so good.