I'd like to see Google offer a low-cost laptop with Android instead of Chrome OS. It seems it would be much more useful. You can have Chrome in Android too, and a huge library of games and applications. If it had ssh access to the underlying Linux OS it would be fantastic.
I've got an Asus Transformer with keyboard dock, purchased over the summer. Using it as a laptop, the thing has one major bonus: with a fully charged dock and a fully charged tablet, I can get around 10-12 hours of use.
But in terms of programs I need to use every day, it's not very good. Apps are inconsistent about including keyboard shortcuts. There's sometimes a small delay when typing. I can have only one fullscreen window per app. The available office programs aren't very good (and I have to deal with docx/xlsx files every day). There's no decent version of LaTex. Using SSH is ok but that's not something I need to do very often. Using RDP to hook up with my office Windows box also works fairly well but I wouldn't want to do extended work that way. I guess for a use case which involves a lot of SSH and/or remote desktop, this might be a very good laptop due to the battery life.
Even though I don't own a Chromebook, I would suspect it's probably better as a laptop even with a reduced number of apps. Overlapping/tiling windows, keyboard shortcuts (presumably) for everything, better support for Google Docs. It only suffers by comparison in regards to the battery life.