These things are getting increasingly more tempting. I'm actually in the market for something to give my parents, but I actually think an 11" screen is too small for them. 13" might be more like it, but in all honesty they probably still need a 15" machine.
But I'm getting increasingly close to picking up one of these just for the hell of it.
I'm typing on a 11" Samsung Chromebook right now and love it, though I never would have expected to be reporting that a year ago. At $140 for a refurbished model, I can take it on trips and not worry about theft.
The biggest trade-off is that I have to keep some of my number-crunching on a server that I ssh into, which does limit working from trains/planes/busses/etc.
My biggest gripe is that the method I'm using to run a proper linux environment (Crouton) creates a startup situation that risks blowing away my hard drive image if anyone but me opens the laptop and follows the "Press the Spacebar to exit Developer Mode" (or whatever it says) message.
I really hope Google realizes they've got a community of programmers using Chromebooks as trip-friendly development machines and creates proper support for dual booting (or chrooting) into linux.
I managed to move most of my development to an offline Samsung Chromebook; depending what work you do (mine is coding and writing) the Chromebook is lovely. Especially the battery life and the price.
My dad loves his Chromebook. TBH he's older and gets confused pretty easily and I don't think I'd trust him to keep even a Mac free of malware. It's basically only either a thin client or an iPad, and we already FaceTime on his iPhone, so dropping the Apple Tax on another iOS device (that doesn't come with a keyboard) doesn't make sense when Chromebooks are so cheap.
I'm also considering a Chromebook for my dad. He's quite computer literate but not really happy with his Win8 laptop.
A Chromebook would serve all his writing/email/browsing needs, but the only question I have is about USB peripherals - can you plug your digital camera in and have it pop up with all the pictures? And then a nice easy workflow to upload to google drive?
I picked one up for household use when I moved my home office to a secluded corner of the basement. Both me and my wife love the samsung chromebook. It was cheap and it just works for 99% of everything we need to do on a computer. I still have my desktop in my office that I work on and we use if we need to do some publishing work ( Inkscape, Gimp, ... ), but I have been extremely happy with my purchase.
I think the low end chromebooks are very diff from the high end.
the one linked here is basically a netbook that doesn't run windows but chromeos instead (ie you can only use chrome stuff). 4GB of ram and 16GB of ssd, low rez, slow cpu, it's pretty crappy ;-)
The high end has good specs - even thus it runs chrome os, at least, it'd make sense to convert it to windows or linux if chrome os was too limited. It's also a lot faster.
The HP Chromebook 14 should be available soon for $299. despite the bigger screen it's still only a 1366x768 resolution which makes it useless for me, but i'm thinking of picking one up for my parents.
But I'm getting increasingly close to picking up one of these just for the hell of it.