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Yeah, I'm convinced for $35 US.

Raspberry Pi with Chrome OS, that might not be bad. I wouldn't pay as much for a chromebook or box as I would for a machine that's capable of running Fedora. Raspberry Can run Fedora as well, but at the low price point It might be nice to just have a dumb terminal.

I think Fry explains my opinion on that idea well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQCP85FngzE

A not very powerful ARM CPU, plus only 256MB of RAM, plus a (slow) SD card (and you need to swap a lot because of the small RAM) for ChromeOS?

Ahem, your definition of "not bad" is interesting, I would say most probably slow as a snail myself..

Edited 2012-05-30 11:32 UTC

Give me a smaller SSD, a thiner body and a ARM SOC and take $250 less from me and I am convinced.

Google really needs to get the ARM port rolling.

Generally, yes. They may switch to ARM SoCs after they smooth out the bugs in the Android port.

Google seems to target larger institutions with that hardware, at least that's what I understand from their offers (subscription option, support contract).

Institutional customers will prefer the unified hardware (ie. tested platform, simple to replace), automatic updates with quality controls on exactly that hardware, recovery mechanisms from boot (it's really hard to kill the software side of these devices) over setting up things themselves, even at a $150 premium. The selling point is "barely any (or 'no') administration required" (the cloud promise, in hardware).

Custom ChromiumOS builds won't provide this.

I think Google targets these customers because it's easier to work with them to get feedback (there's generally more patience in an institution than in a private customer), easier to provide support for (there is _some_ support infrastructure on the customer end), and a more clearly defined scope (institutions can define a-priori what use cases they have, so they'll know if a ChromeBox is a good match).

Once Google gained confidence with this part of the market I'd expect them to push into the personal computing market (and adapt volume and pricing accordingly).

tl;dr: These systems aren't for endusers yet, so they don't need enduser pricing at this time.

Yeah, but did they have success selling this to any institution yet?

Do they even use them internally at Google? I mean, on a wide scale, not just the ChromeOS team eating its own dog food?

I don't think that Google Docs is at the point where it could replace MS Office for most workers/students at large institutions. If they get it to the point where its as good as libreoffice, then they have a chance to take market share from the traditional Linux Desktop at large corporations.