For me, the Chromebook killer feature is that it's not got any state: if I borrow someone else's Chromebook, or demolish my own and get a new one, everything I have is back again. I am sick and tired of having to worry about backups! They're such a headache.

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.