For businesses, it is a cheap enough to be a "throw away" and I would rather manage a Terminal Server (RDS nowadays) or cloud apps than many individual laptops. Centralizing the support of laptops alone could save huge amounts of time and money.
For education, the normal alternative is MacBooks. But would it not be more financially responsible to the tax payers to buy Chromebooks instead? Again, they are throw away devices due to the price and it should be assumed students will damage the laptops they are give. Finally, centralized control and management yet again.
For individuals, I see almost no reason not to use a Chromebook. Yes, some people prefer legacy apps and need some beefy hardware to encode videos, but most users are the target market: web browsers who write a document once in a while.
Obviously, each of these circumstances proves more difficult if constant internet access is not possible. But given the world today this should only be an issue for a very small selection of buyers.