So, I've been using this ChromeOS notebook for a couple or three hours now. Most things work fine. I've done the usual email and documents work in Gmail, made a couple of phone calls using Google Voice in Gmail, and played a couple of screens of Angry Birds.
Right now I'm listing to music on Amazon Cloud Player.
Connecting to wifi was very simple.
Mouse motion, famously problematic on this hardware, was a little flaky when trying to play Angry Birds, but otherwise I don't notice much problem. I finally found the check box to enable tap to click, so that is all better now.
I found the terminal with ssh via Ctl-Alt-T and tried it out. It works but, again, wide-screen insanity prevails. Also the font and colors need to be fixed in the terminal. It's a limited set of commands but ssh is really all I'd need.
Right now it's on the charger and has charged up to 78%.