I mainly bought my chromebook convertible for university for notetaking. But now I am also doing all my freelance development work on open-source high availability and fault tolerance (qemu colo[1] if you're interested) on this thing. And it works great, the linux VM is very capable with seamless file, wayland and X11 passtrough. Nested virtualization works too.
Sure, it's not native but I don't see a reason why it should be. Google is actually caring about security here, you see it in every part and decision of ChromeOS. Google is taking VM based isolation to the mainstream and showing that a secure OS without ransomware is possible.
And the defaults are well done. The terminal app has infinite scrollback by default and is not too far off of xterm. The touchpad experience is excellent, switching between tabs, going forwards and backwards in history, switching virtual desktops and apps all done with a few gestures.
And don't forget the fonts, ChromeOS is worth it for the fonts alone :). Noto Sans Mono is the default monospace font system-wide, even in the linux VM. It looks awesome in emacs.
The maintainers of the linux part are very friendly, they will actually fix bugs you report. And that ChromeOS as a comercial/consumer OS has a public bug tracker at all, makes it very unique. Try that with windows :).
If you want a excellent out-of-the box (with few exceptions*) linux experience, buy a chromebook. Especially if you want more exotic hardware like convertible with pen input.
About the LaCrOs switch: I suspect the reason why Chrome was so deep integrated into the OS, is because there weren't any good graphics protocols (besides X11 which is meh.) when it launched so Chrome became application and window manager and compositor in one. And now that wayland has matured they are switching to it.
* You're not going to get direct hardware access from the linux VM, so things like running wireshark on your wlan interface, mounting a harddrive that isn't plain exfat or ext4, etc. won't work.
An apple silicon/arm is the ideal laptop form factor since it's fast and has no fan, but apple won't let google use that as a building block of course. I have tried running x86 binaries on my mac studio, it's dead slow as others have reported with ubuntu; I tried an arm ubuntu image and it ran at native speed. I couldn't immediate figure out how to get an arm chromeos vm to try to run on it.
The author mentions various driver-like things, such as a custom keyboard. Can such custom drivers be installed when not in Developer Mode? I see no mechanism to do so, nor any "ChromeOS app store" where I might download such things.
If you're a ChromeOS developer, where and how do you distribute your products?
App distribution is a major issue for the platform that I ran out of space to really talk about. Those driver-like things are largely extension APIs, but they were once the domain of the now deprecated "Chrome Apps." Both the Apps and Extensions are delivered via the Web Store, but I feel like there's a steady move to deprecate all system-customization on the platform.
If you want to use some non-optimized apps in a VM though, you can use the Gnome Software store or the Google Play Store.
And you can run android apps in a android VM.
To avoid the android type mess Chromeos is and was always in the iron grip of Google. That is the way to keep things secure. And I am glad it is so. Once you expose important APIs to the main google account - there will be tons of crap ChromeAPPS (not android but the chrome apps) that will be difficult to supervise (i.e) repeat of playstore.
Though painful and slow the aim is to move everything non-google to PlayStore. That way all crap is isolated into android.
For the commandline or linux person, the VM is always there.
There's also the fact that the Android VM can't do certain things that Android phones and tablets can. As an example, files management in the Android VM is so bad that I lost access to standard access for months due to a bug...
Also, the Android environment is all the way back on version 11. If your theory is correct, that Google wants to move third-party developers to Android, then they're doing a terrible job of it. Android devs haven't and won't target all these outdated devices.
I believe Chromeos is becoming an enterprise/edu only platform. That would explain the (new) lack of interest in development and focus on security at the cost of all functionality. This is a new development and wasn't "always" the case as you claim, because many of these apis are as old as Chromeos itself (10-ish years).
See they are learning a lesson from iOS. Keep tight control - at whatever cost. The same complaints about file management is there in iPad but devs have no option.
And despite Linux being in a virtual machine the general experience is very seamless - I can install .deb packages by simply double clicking them in the file explorer!
Oh and most importantly, GeForce NOW works and I can still use it to play BG3 :D
(it goes without saying that the experience is much better if you're already tied to Google ecosystem, as the file explorer integrates, optionally, with Google Drive)