* Ubuntu: why ubuntu? because it is _popular_? that's a bad reason, and it's magnified that this is supposed to be a teaching tool. How can you justify teaching kids to do something because it's popular?
* Must have Chrome: I read this and laughed. As a fairly large supporter of the free software foundation, I am frankly appalled that you want to use chrome when there are many better and more free alternatives. There is of course firefox, which is free, but if your real desire is the webkit rendering engine or v8, then there is always chromium or DWB.
* Minecraft: I play minecraft, and I think it's fun. I write mods, and I run servers. But to include video games on an educational computer is repulsive and you should be ashamed. So what if kids like it? Kids like refined sugar too, lets just give that to students as a way for them to enjoy food.
Some other points: The wide variety of programming languages is good, but the list you provided is noticeably lacking C (the most widely used language) or any systems language. Programming is about much more than stupid hello world programs and writing silly kiddie games, and should be treated as such. I also noticed a lack of purely functional languages, which bothers me more than I can effectively express in words. The lack of internet is good, but you completely missed the existence of man pages and virtually all compilers work offline as well. Having a great editor is fantastic, and I use sublime text (I even paid $70 for the license!), but as many people have said, you shouldn't. That $70 is much better spent on better hardware for the computer, and shipping with unlicensed software is wrong. Vim and Emacs are both more than capable of doing EVERYTHING sublime does and are much lighter weight, and free. Including the paragraph about the 'custom sidebar' is laughable. Aside from the fact that I dislike Unity and that the sidebar can be configured by students already, I don't think it's appropriate to coerce students into using the software YOU want them too. That flies so hard in the face of the unix philosophy. the function keys are easy to remap. I suggest looking into sxhkd as a replacement for the bloated tools you listed. It's free software and can be found on github. It is written by the same author as bspwm. developer mode screen: so reformat the laptop. I did it with arch and it works fine and has no 'scary screen' as you put it. *trackpad support is not the responsibility of the kernel, and a kernel update will not in fact remove support. This problem can easily be solved by distributing modified versions of the apt-get remote upstream lists.
My final remark is that every time I hear someone refer to themselves as a 'coder' rather than a programmer, I die a bit inside. Please take this profession seriously and don't encourage what are commonly know as 'skript kiddies'.