Compare this(and the response to it) to the overall perception of JavaScript 5 years ago. It's interesting to see how decent tooling and some good language changes can move the perspective from largely disparaged to greatly desired.
Three words: Dell Venue Pro
...which was a fantastic phone. I love this form factor. Will this spark a physical keyboard resurgence or is this dead on arrival?
It doesn't just have to be hardware level hacking. c9 is great but, anywhere that you want a decent amount of control over web server(apache, tomcat) configs, graphics acceleration for games, or storage of large local files, you're going to need something more. I'd take Ubuntu any day. Given the choice, what are some reasons to actually choose Chrome OS over Ubuntu?