First of all, Google Hangouts replaces Skype, WebRTC eventually will too, and Google Docs or MS Office 365 are both perfectly good Office suites.
Second, the idea is simplicity. Anyone can maintain an up to date Chrome OS system. Anyone's grandmother could have an up to date, virus-free Chrome OS laptop.
Native apps? Chrome has Native Client. It's up to developers to make use of it. Not to mention technologies like Emscripten - again, up to developers. Anyone, what's out there on the web already is enough for most people.
If it's not enough, you can turn on developer mode, and run regular Linux apps (install with Portage), or install Ubuntu with Crouton.
Anyhow, Chrome OS solves 80% of use cases out of the box, and the rest with a little effort.
Google Hangouts is nice, but most/all of my clients use Skype and cant be bothered to switch. So while in theory not a big deal, in practice it kind of is. Even running Skype in a Linux enviroment is kind of a pain im afraid.
While the ubiquity of Skype is nice, I remember a time when people used other things. That might change someday as well. Either way, that's out of Google's hands, it's up to MS.
I've always found getting Skype running on Linux to be easy though (Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Arch are all trivial)...
First of all, Google Hangouts replaces Skype, WebRTC eventually will too, and Google Docs or MS Office 365 are both perfectly good Office suites.
Second, the idea is simplicity. Anyone can maintain an up to date Chrome OS system. Anyone's grandmother could have an up to date, virus-free Chrome OS laptop.
Native apps? Chrome has Native Client. It's up to developers to make use of it. Not to mention technologies like Emscripten - again, up to developers. Anyone, what's out there on the web already is enough for most people.
If it's not enough, you can turn on developer mode, and run regular Linux apps (install with Portage), or install Ubuntu with Crouton.
Anyhow, Chrome OS solves 80% of use cases out of the box, and the rest with a little effort.