I don't think it's all that surprising. If my daily routine consisted mostly of email and simple documents (i.e. not code) I'd buy one in a heartbeat. They're great little machines.
I had a chance to play with the Pixel version and it's really nice. Cold boots in something like 7 seconds. Chiclet-style keyboard, nice touchpad, etc.
Truthfully I'm not sure my next laptop won't be a chromebook anyways: Surely it's possible to put linux on them, in which case you've basically got yourself a netbook.
I got a Pixel at IO, and my wife won one of the HP Chromebooks in the "Give a Chromebook" contest Google ran earlier this year. We use them so much - they're our go-to machines for most things (I'm on my desktop for work, but any time I'm not in my office I'm on the Chromebook), and we have desktops that we can jump to if we need heavier work. However, most of our email/social networking/music/youtube/netflix/recipes/general googling happens on them.
Chromebooks aren't full replacements for how we use computers, but they're 95% of the way there, and given how inexpensive and light they are (not to mention how freakin' fast they are to boot/wake) they're an amazing complement to most computing cases.
My dev setup for years has been a Windows client working against a Linux box on my LAN. This works great with the Chromebook because I can just SSH into my Linux box and work in vim - the lack of computing power or storage doesn't bother me because all the real work happens on my beefy server, but I can still hang out on the couch with my boys and code.
My daily routine consists of code and I still enjoy my chromebook. It has ssh, so I don't need to wipe everything to do the little bit of coding I need to when I'm on the go.
It's not a replacement for my desktop machine, but still worth the $250 bucks.
I'm getting along very well with an HP Chromebook 14 running crouton. I do programming and watch videos and other stuff without involving The Cloud. Not an option for the average consumer but for HN readers, an intriguing option.
I had a chance to play with the Pixel version and it's really nice. Cold boots in something like 7 seconds. Chiclet-style keyboard, nice touchpad, etc.
Truthfully I'm not sure my next laptop won't be a chromebook anyways: Surely it's possible to put linux on them, in which case you've basically got yourself a netbook.